Why mrosight exists, and why it's not Coupa
We mined 62 procurement voices off Reddit and Trustpilot before writing a single line of code. This is the pattern that kept showing up — and the product brief it produced.
The week before we started building mrosight, we did one thing: read everything UK manufacturing FDs were saying about their existing procurement tools. 62 separate voices across r/procurement, r/maintenance, r/Accounting, Trustpilot, G2 reviews, and a Hacker News thread or two.
The pattern was consistent enough to hurt.
"Coupa is too much. Excel is too little."
The most-quoted line came from a 180-staff manufacturing CFO on r/procurement:
"The implementation alone was quoted at six months and the contract value would have made it our most expensive piece of software by a wide margin. Every demo is either a glorified spreadsheet that does not solve anything or another Coupa-style pitch that ignores the realities of running procurement at a size like ours."
Two failure modes, no middle. Coupa / Ariba / SAP-anything is sized for $500M ARR companies with a procurement team. Excel is sized for one buyer with a Friday afternoon. There is no tool sized for the 50–499-staff UK fab-metal shop with a part-time FD and 800 supplier invoices a month.
That's the gap.
What FDs actually want — three asks, repeated
Filtering out the noise, three things came up across every voice:
- "Tell me which 3 suppliers to call this week." Not 30 metrics. Not a dashboard with 80 tiles. A ranked list with the £-impact per row.
- "Categorise correctly by default." Every FD has been burned by GIGO categorisation. They want fab-metal categories (cutting tools, fasteners, abrasives, welding consumables) — not "consumables" as a single bucket — and they want to fix one in a click.
- "Don't make me read another month-end report." They want anomaly detection, not retrospection. "Which line moved more than it should have?" not "here's last quarter's spend."
The product brief that fell out
mrosight's first 8 detection rules were written from this list, not from a wireframe. Each rule is paired with a verbatim quote from the user-voice study:
1. Supplier action queue — "Which 3 suppliers this week" 2. Anomaly with driver attribution — "Don't tell me what, tell me why" 3. Price drift across vendors — "Tell me which one is overcharging" 4. Recurring creep / subscription leak — "Stop me getting nickel-and-dimed" 5. Tail consolidation with £ savings — "Show me where to consolidate" 6. Single-source concentration risk — "Where am I exposed" 7. Passthrough / middleman markup — "Who's reselling to me at +12%" 8. Data quality / confidence score — "I don't trust dashboards I can't audit"
Each rule outputs a £-impact, a one-line rationale, and where applicable, a paste-ready outreach email.
What we deliberately don't do
- We don't replace your accounts package. We sit on top, read-only.
- We don't run a supplier portal. Suppliers never log in.
- We don't pretend to be enterprise. Pricing tiers will land when 20 paying customers tell us what's worth charging for.
- We don't hide behind a sales call. The full demo runs at /demo without a signup.
What's next
We're in private beta with the first cohort of UK fab-metal SMEs. If your shop runs 50–499 staff and has the same Coupa-or-Excel problem, the live demo is the fastest way to see if mrosight fits.
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