"It's user-friendly, in terms of the design of the tool."
"The most valuable features are the sourcing and tendering processes."
"Among the most valuable features are the ability to send out purchase orders, create catalogs, and accept invoices through procurement. And the reporting function is robust."
"The AI tool definitely has learned from the information we've given it but also from some of the corrections that we've made. It may have auto-applied a classification and then we have gone in and corrected it, given it some feedback. With that, more and more, we are not having to touch the information once it gets processed. It's classifying it from the get-go in the correct category."
"There are additional time savings in managing communications. If you have an open RFP and there are questions, you can manage all of the questions and answers in the thread inside that RFP. All the suppliers will get any notifications that you want them to get, and everything is within the body of the RFP so you don't have to worry about things in email, outside of the system."
"On the spend side, it's integrated with our accounting system and has bimonthly uploads of data. So we have pretty current spend information that we can access and build reports on."
"The biggest selling point for us was having the contracts repository centralized for both systems. People are able to search for a contract. Typically, before they go out to bid or engage with a supplier, procurement folks come into GEP SMART and they search for a contract and check to see if there is an existing contract in place."
"It's really simple to use. That's one of the reasons we chose GEP over some of the others. It's very Google-like. On the homepage, you just type whatever you need. And there are tabs that can come up if you're looking for a certain word or phrase..."
"Ariba allows us to manage our suppliers seamlessly."
"It is one of the best tools in the market."
"It is a stable solution."
"I like the guided buying features."
"The best features are the ease of use and the workflow management that allows me to understand every step in the approval process so that I can forecast the time through my request and its approval."
"We had a lot of challenges and disagreements with SMART. It's been a long road, for sure, on the contract side. There is a little bit of pushback on their part when we need stuff done. Things aren't done very efficiently. I'm still waiting on some changes that were requested well over a year-and-a-half ago."
"While it captures all the fields and requirements, when any supplier updates or new supplier registration happens, then the supplier needs to update their bank details. Our IT team has made it so every half an hour the GEP SMART system will push the supplier to the Oracle Database. So, we have faced some problems, like bank details, etc. We addressed this issue with GEP. They are working on it to make bank details a mandatory field for any supplier and match our requirements. Their engineering team has taken up creating a customized process for us."
"I want to see continued investment in analytics and reporting."
"Their contracts module is kind of clunky and It took a while for them to correct some of the basic functionality, some of the "Contract Management 101" functions, but it seems to be coming around. It wasn't working the way we'd expected."
"We definitely have some asks for enhancements. One of the big ones we'd like to see is what we call "drag-and-drop." If I have an email that I want to maintain in the SMART record for whatever reason — for example, it has supporting information in it — I would love to be able to just drop that into the notes and attachments section without having to save it as a PDF and then upload it."
"I'd like to see drag-and-drop reporting. They have the old model for reports where you have to click the "run" button. The thing runs and then you have to export it to PowerPoint."
"Very recently, they implemented a customer success team to manage our expectations and communicate them to their technical team. That function is relatively new and some work needs to be done to build that connection so that it's a little more seamless."
"There are no mechanisms for them to check up on how they refresh their data. So oftentimes, when we go into the tool and we don't see something, we alert them and they say, "Oh, the data hasn't been refreshed, so we'll go ahead and refresh it," and then what we're looking for pops up. We should not have to be the ones to tell them they need to refresh. There should be a mechanism in place for that."
"I would like to see more reports coming out of Ariba and more insights because it has to work in connection with SAP. So unless I run SAP and Ariba, I have to run. I am not able to see the utility of Ariba."
"I would like the solution to be more automatic."
"SAP could make it easier for people to become SAP Ariba consultants within the SAP ecosystem."
"Ariba Procurement tends to integrate best with other SAP products and is harder to work with if you have non-SAP products in your architecture."
"They should make the solution more user-friendly."
Earn 20 points
GEP SMART is ranked 4th in Procurement Software while SAP Ariba Procurement is ranked 1st in Procurement Software with 8 reviews. GEP SMART is rated 8.4, while SAP Ariba Procurement is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of GEP SMART writes "Provides us with more frequent, fresh spend data and alerts us about contract renewals". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP Ariba Procurement writes "Easy to use but lacks advanced features". GEP SMART is most compared with Zycus Source to Pay Suite and Coupa Procure, whereas SAP Ariba Procurement is most compared with SAP Fieldglass, Oracle Procurement Cloud, Oracle E-Business Suite iProcurement, Coupa Procure and Zycus Source to Pay Suite.
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