We use it for everything from source to contract. We're not using any P2P, but we use it for all of our spend analysis, all our RFXs, managing and tracking savings, and we use the supplier database strictly for contract and other sourcing events. We also use the contract repository and have automatic notifications set up for 30, 60, 90, and 120 days for every contract.

We primarily use it so that we can do sourcing with suppliers. We're able to send out notices to our suppliers to say, "We have an RFP or an RFI or an RFQ that we want you to bid against." We use it to collect their input and evaluate what we're getting to decide which vendor we will use in the particular situation.

That process requires that we have both the sourcing module and the supplier management module. The supplier management module is where we keep track of our suppliers and we can communicate across the platform to the supplier in multiple ways. We can send information back or get information from them, rather than go through email.

The third module is the spend analysis module. That is where we're able to evaluate how much we spend on different vendors, both from a CapEx and an OpEx perspective, year over year. We're able to say, "This is how much we spent with vendor A in 2017, 2018, and 2019." We use that information both to see whether that spend is increasing or decreasing, and primarily, so that we have the ability to see those spends and determine whether we want to push more at a particular vendor or less.

We're also using it for auctions. We're able to send out information to all the vendors for a particular product and say, "You have X amount of time to respond, and we want to see who's got the lowest price." They can't see each others' bids, so they have to sharpen their pencils to be able to win.

Some of the reasons we went with a solution like this were 

• to keep everything in one place
• to have a tool that helps us facilitate sourcing 
• to facilitate some of the hard-to-do things when it comes to evaluations.

We're leveraging SMART for four of their modules. We use it for sourcing, contracts, suppliers, and spending. However, we're not leveraging it for procurement to pay the downstream operations based on our current technical infrastructure. The most common use cases stem from procurement on the sourcing side for a need to go out to bid. And then on contracts, flipping those sourcing events to a contract or the awarded RFPs. For contracts, any master agreement that we do is also added into SMART. It's mainly used as a post-execution lifecycle management tool on the contract side. Based on our kind of utilization and desire, we have pre-execution capabilities enabled, but based on the maturity of our organization, we are actively leveraging it in that manner.

There are three main reasons that we started working with this product. The first one was to plan projects and report the savings. In this use case, we rely on GEP as a reporting tool for procurement.

The second reason we use it is for online sourcing. In this context, it gives us a platform to run online RFPs, RFIs, and online auctions.

The third reason is to use it for a contract repository.

We use it for spend analytics. I'm on the procurement team in my company and it's used for reviewing how each of our departments is spending.

We also use it for payment-term analysis, evaluating how many payment terms our company has with vendors. We try to use that information to standardize the payments that we have and to look for working-capital benefits, in some cases, with vendors that we have shorter pay terms with. 

We use this tool in our supply chain department as our SRM tool. It interfaces to our business operating system, which is managed by SAP. The supplier module interfaces, through middleware called TIBCO, to our vendor master in SAP. The sourcing events primarily stay in GEP. The contracts module can be created and the workflow executed in GEP, and then it can create an SAP contract. Our purchase orders, requisitions, and work orders are all created in SAP and go to the cloud and the vendor through the portal in P2P.

We have the spend module, the supplier module, sourcing, contract, and P2P. It is 100 percent in the cloud.

We primarily use it for two things: as a purchase-order invoicing system and for reporting and spend management.

For my area, it's the contract module. It's for the lifecycle of contracting. I am in the legal department, and we have attorneys as well as senior legal specialists and legal specialists who work with this, strictly from the drafting and reviewing of the legal side of things. I'm the contract module administrator for the SMART program within our organization. 

This year we did add the sourcing procurement modules to it, which are being used more on the procurement side of our business supply chain. I do nothing with the supply chain sourcing side of it, such as the requests for proposals, the metrics that they're doing with spending analytics, etc.

There are two university systems within our state. In the two systems together, we have a total of 35 campuses. We use GEP SMART as more of an upstream, front-end procurement software. We don't have a full P2P installed. We only use it to facilitate requests for quotes, requests for proposals, and requests for information. When the sourcing event is done, we leverage the GEP SMART contract module to store fully-executed contracts. 

We also leverage the supplier management module, but that is only to facilitate sourcing events. We don't use it as a full supply-relationship management tool.

We do use their spend to run analytical reports and for opportunity-finding. 

It is a SaaS solution for us.

We are using it mainly for the RFQ, RFP, tendering, etc. 

We are also using it for contract management. Though, we haven't completely used all aspects of the contract management, e.g., we have used the supplier evaluation. We are uploading the contracts, then it is giving us reminders for renewals. For the contract administration part, we are getting notifications from the system. 

We have used it for a sealed bid and evaluation. It has functioned well.

We are using it for sourcing management. Since we have DOA approvals in the Oracle system, we cannot use the purchase requisition as well as a purchase order process in GEP SMART. When a request is coming from the user department, it will need approvals. Once it has the system approvals, it comes as a notification. Then, we will use GEP SMART as a standalone program to function from tendering until finalizing the tender. We then take that final result back to Oracle for the approval process. That is how it functions.

We use SMART by GEP for spend management. It is heavily used for enterprise spend and diversity reporting. We've been using it primarily for the latter, which is good. We report our diversity spend out to our board of directors on a quarterly basis. In order to do diversity spend, you've got to get your denominator right, which means you have to figure out what the enterprise spend is.

Some of our category groups have been using the enterprise spend for their initiatives.

In terms of e-RFx, we've been using a tool for a number of RFIs and RFPs — mostly RFPs depending on the category and the use case. We work with the teams try to figure out what the needs are, where they need our support, whether we need to build the RFP on their behalf and facilitate it, or if they will build it and we will just monitor and help them out throughout the process.

We also work with suppliers who may be having issues. We're getting a little bit more strategic with that in 2020, building out a robust pipeline and timing, so that we can make sure that we have support in that area.

Sustainability is actually the next thing that we're going to be focusing on. That one's a little bit tougher, not from a tool perspective but from a data perspective, because there's a sense that having suppliers identify sustainable products will be a lot of work. Then we have to remap the data schema. A whole bunch of stuff that needs to happen, so that's an initiative for 2020.

We use it for streamlining the source-to-contract process, from opportunity identification through to negotiation and contracting for preferred vendors.

It's a SaaS model.

We use it in our supply management group for contract management and spend analytics.

On our contract side, we're in v2.0. And on our spend side we're also in v2.0.