Pros to Know: Coupa's Dean Bain Talks Adaptive Supply Chain

Dean Bain serves as the general manager of Coupa’s supply chain solutions portfolio, leading a cross-functional organization of over 200 team members across product, sales, delivery, and customer success. In this role, he is responsible for shaping and overseeing product strategy and go-to-market initiatives to ensure that Coupa’s supply chain solutions address the evolving and complex challenges faced by global businesses. His day-to-day tasks include driving product innovation, aligning teams to deliver customer-centric solutions, and ensuring widespread adoption of Coupa’s capabilities. Bain is also focused on enabling customers to achieve measurable outcomes, delivering 10-30% savings and risk mitigation across the entire supply chain to support their long-term success and resilience.

Bain joined Coupa at the beginning of 2024 to lead supply chain strategy and go-to-market. In just one year, he's transformed the entire supply chain organization from establishing Coupa’s long-term vision for supply chain to building out global go-to-market teams across North America, Latin America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Throughout the year, he has focused on bringing incredible talent to the organization; helped to envision game-changing product roadmaps; and under his guidance, has transformed the business from a sole focus of supply chain design to the adaptive supply chain. Here, he collaborated with product and engineering to build out the future of collaborative tactical supply chain planning through new innovation such as Integrated Scenario Planning. Also since joining Coupa, Bain has helped grow the company's market presence and voice in supply chain, which led to record-breaking growth for the company and measured growth of over 40%. On top of this, Bain has led initiatives to bring Coupa into the direct spend space, bridging the gap between supply chain design, planning, and direct procurement. 

Over the next 12 months, Bain is focused on achieving continued double-digit growth for the Coupa business by expanding market adoption, enhancing customer value, and ensuring Coupa’s supply chain solutions remain at the forefront of the industry. A major priority is the launch of new capabilities designed to empower supply chain, finance, and procurement leaders. These innovations will enable leaders to harness data and leverage AI-driven insights to elevate strategic decision-making across the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) horizon. 

We talked exclusively with Bain about the concept of design-to-pay, making time to mentor and the ins and outs of adaptive supply chains.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Let’s first talk about you. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your journey to get to this current stage in your career?

Dean Bain: My journey in supply chain software leadership began back in 2010. After having ran my own business in manufacturing sales and later selling logistics and distribution services for the likes of DHL and UPS, I tied my experiences together and brokered my way into the software side of supply chain. I began my software career at Red Prairie, helping companies solve for complex distribution and transportation challenges which over my 10 years later became JDA and lastly Blue Yonder. I successfully helped numerous companies realize millions of dollars in savings and worked my way into senior management over the course of my career. I found myself at Coupa running our supply chain practice in the winter of 2023.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: One of the things outlined in your submission is how you are responsible for shaping and overseeing product strategy and go-to-market initiatives. Tell us more about what this is entails.

Bain: As general manager for Coupa Supply Chain my responsibilities encompass the entire P&L of our business. With this, my team and I set out to develop a product roadmap that continues to evolve with the fast-paced environment of software, constantly seeking ways to make our technology faster, easier to use, simpler to deploy and of course substantiated with Next-Gen AI capabilities. As we evolve our product strategy, our go to market initiatives must align – as such we constantly look for ways to scale our business effectively - from partnerships with consulting firms to integration with complimentary technology – Supply Chains are not static so neither can we be.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Also outlined in your nomination form is how you transformed the business from a sole focus of supply chain design to the adaptive supply chain. What is the difference? And what benefits does doing so bring your customers?

Bain: Supply chain design historically was based on understanding the implications of long-term decisions within the network. In today’s world we are constantly pressured by disruption – from strikes and delays to regulation to tariffs – adaptive supply chain is about taking continuous decisions and always being aware of the next challenge. At Coupa, we are tying our capabilities closer than ever to the supply chain planning systems where we are helping some of the world’s largest and most complex supply chains understand not just what lies ahead on the strategic horizon, 2-3 years out, but what challenges they need to adapt to in the tactical horizon too, weeks and months out. Our capabilities drive what we call the adaptive supply chain – supply chains that are anti-fragile and autonomous.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: In the next 12 months, your goal is to launch new capabilities designed to empower supply chain, finance, and procurement leaders. Can you tell us more about these new capabilities?

Bain: Our roadmap is built on the concept of design-to-pay – bringing strategic alignment across multiple functions of the business – supply chain, direct procurement, supplier collaboration, and invoicing. One way in which we are doing this is with a new set of capabilities built around what we call integrated scenario planning (ISP). ISP empowers businesses to make informed trade-off decisions within the supply chain by considering multiple dynamic variables. Teams can evaluate adjustments to supply chain structures, policies, and constraints, making it easy to test a range of scenarios—from facility closures and capacity changes to product expansions and supplier shifts.

By bringing these capabilities together our customers will have greater intelligence into the performance of their supply chain, but not only that, the ability to react to supply constraints and disruptions. We aim to bring agile decision making across a multi period horizon with decisive analytics that empower not just the supply chain analyst but the supply chain planners and CSCO.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: If you could have a conversation with your younger self, what would you tell him?

Bain: Always be learning. Life is an evolution of knowledge, passion, and creativity – you never know where you will end up and what skills you will need. Embrace change and absorb as much knowledge and experience as you can along the way.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: The Top Procurement Pros category recognizes professionals in the procurement space. What advice do you have for other procurement leaders in the supply chain space?

Bain: It’s up to us as leaders in this space to shape the next generation and influence those still looking to decide where their career will take them. With that we all have a part to play in shaping the future of our industry and the future leaders of our industries. So, with that, I highly encourage my peers - make the time to mentor. Free time to have unstructured conversations and exploration with those early in their careers.

CLICK HERE to view the full list of winners.