GEP SMART Reviews

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 didn't have a single sourcing technology within the two university systems. With GEP SMART, we have that one sourcing technology. There's a huge process improvement. If one campus wants to send out an RFP to multiple suppliers for lab supplies, for instance, they can search for any sourcing events on lab supplies and see that we did a lab supply RFP six months ago. They can assume it's closed and ready. They can then check if a contract stemmed from that particular sourcing event. If there is one, then this particular location doesn't have to go through the same process all over again. Some such processes can be very lengthy and it's wasteful for them to do exactly same process again, qualifying the same supplier, and then finding out that we already have a contract in place.

GEP SMART gives people the visibility that we need. A second campus that needs to source for the same category, instead of focusing on the bidding process, can actually focus on implementing and working with a supplier and their stakeholders to make sure that they implement the contract properly. They are able to manage that category, as opposed to spending their time on the bidding process. That has been a huge process improvement for us.

In terms of the solution contributing to the digital transformation of our organization, being in higher education we're a little bit behind. A lot of things are done manually. We have a very strict contract code that is driven by the state. Where private companies are not obligated to follow that code, as a public entity we have to follow it. The technologies to mimic exactly how we do business didn't exist. RFPs would be put into an envelope and handed to suppliers who would come on campus to get them. Who does that these days? Now, all RFPs are digitized. They get stored in a central location and are available for people to search, rather than sitting in somebody else's filing cabinet.

Similarly for contracts, campuses have a big file cabinet containing them, with signatures. People had somebody physically sign those contracts. Now we have electronic signature functionality, so contracts are routed through approval flow, electronically signed, and then automatically stored in the contract module. It has been a huge transformation. It was a huge culture shock for a lot of us who have been here for 25 years and doing the same things all that time. There are still some people who are not as accepting of the change. Others say, "This is great. I don't have to keep a big file cabinet in my office. I can get rid of all of this." We still have something of a mixed group of people in our organization, but it has definitely transformed the way that we do business.

The digital transformation and people being able to search and the reduction in redundancy are all part of the efficiency and process improvement, from our perspective, and there's a huge benefit to it.

The solution definitely saves us time when setting up an RFP. Not everyone is going into GEP SMART to search right away, but at our current adoption rate, it is saving us about 60 to 65 percent of the time RFPs used to take.

GEP SMART is a very intuitive technology. Most of the time people can get a pretty good sense of how to navigate within the tool, although there are some areas that are not as easy to figure out. 

The specific functionality that we use most is the contract module. People liked the idea because we never had a system — a central contract repository for both university systems. 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 search to see if there is an existing contract in place. That's one of the highlights: having that centralized contract repository. I don't know if it's really something that GEP SMART is providing, or it's more process-driven, now that we have a place to put contracts. People put them in and are able to look for them. So it's a starting point.

We do have a very diverse workforce. Many of our people are very system-savvy and they tend to say that it is extremely intuitive. They click here and there and can use it. But some of the folks are not system-savvy. Whether it's intuitive or not, they have a hard time navigating.

I don't think their supplier management module is ready, from a full supply-relationship management perspective. The scope is very limited for supplier management.

Also, in the contract module, the searching capability is sub-par. Most people are used to Google search and Amazon search. That's what's available on a day-to-day basis. GEP SMART's searching capability is extremely difficult to use. Their logic is different from Google and Amazon, so they return a lot of search results, which is something we're not really happy about.

Another issue that I want to provide feedback on is that their icons are not as visible and as accessible as they should be. If we have someone with some form of disability, it's not easy for them to figure things out. When you hover an icon a little message pops up and tells you what it is, but the icons are so small and look very similar. It's a design element that looks great but it's a little hard to hover and makes for an accessibility issue. But overall, in general, it is intuitive to use.

Also, I know that GEP, as a company, has been in business for close to 20 years, but they still operate as more of a startup and smaller company. They need to revamp their processes and put in controls in terms of quality assurance and quality control.

In terms of their processes, 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. They're a technology company and their product is where we put our data. The refresh cycle should be automatic.

As for quality control, I don't know if they do enough testing. When they release new enhancements, they do testing and it passes and that's why they push it to production. But it seems they only test that particular functionality and that they don't test how that functionality interacts with and impacts other functionalities. So that particular functionality itself is working, but oftentimes functionalities are interdependent and when we try to click on certain things which should behave in certain ways or bring us certain results, they don't work.

We have to tell them, "Hey, it's not working. You need to fix this." Quite frankly, we're tired of informing GEP. They should be scrubbing from the left and right and from top to bottom to make sure that anything that they're releasing is fully tested. I get it, that one or two fall through the cracks. But it happens consistently that we're concerned with the data integrity because a refresh cycle didn't happen or there's a stability issue where something is working but when coupled with other functionalities it fails and we get an error message.

Those are some of the things that the GEP is lacking. If they do want to compete in this market with other, bigger players, they need to up that game. GEP, as a company, is putting so much focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. That's great. We love it. And that's where the industry is moving. We like seeing those on their roadmap. However, foundationally, they need to fix some of their processes before they bring in the above-and-beyond bells and whistles. If their basic functionalities are not functioning the way that they're supposed to and they keep building on a broken foundation and adding more, eventually it will collapse. It will become too top-heavy. This has been a message that we've been sending to GEP over the course of the last two years.

I understand that to keep up with the industry, they need to bring in some of the newer technologies, a newer perspective. That's a business decision. But they still need to go back to their core technology and really enhance that, so that when they add something it really couples with that core and enhances their technology overall.

In addition, from our perspective, the way that they manage their technology is very fragmented. I mentioned that we use four different modules of GEP SMART but they were built in silos. Although they actually promote this or sell it as a fully-integrated solution, the way that we search in the sourcing module is different from the way we search in the contract module. Why are they different? It should be consistent. Another example is that the supplier ID in the supplier module is different from the supplier ID in the contract and sourcing modules, although it's the same supplier. Even though we enter and register our supplier in the supplier module, when they float through to the contract module and sourcing module, they generate a different supplier ID in the backend, so it's extremely difficult to trace back to see if it's the same supplier. If it's stemming from one module, it should be duplicated across all modules, as opposed to creating another copy of it. That confirms that they're building their technology in a very fragmented way. That needs to be addressed.

We have a huge number of duplicate suppliers created. When someone facilitates a sourcing event, they enter suppliers' names differently. A classic example is IBM, which can be entered as "IBM Corporation", "IBM Corp" or just "IBM". Sometimes it's entered as "International Business Machines." GEP has been trying to work with us to leverage machine learning and AI to prevent people from creating duplicate suppliers. It hasn't been fully built-out. And there still needs to be some manual intervention. The human element needs to be there. Once it's fully built-out, it might help us. One of the things they proposed was that machine learning and AI would pop up a window that says, "Hey, we have all these similar company names." Based on what was entered — not just the supplier name but the contact information and addresses — it would say, "This company is about 80 percent matching to what you entered, so why don't you use this one instead of creating another one." There is stuff coming, but it's still not there. We're testing it out right now. We're hopeful that it will at least provide some guidelines for our folks, and at least cause them to pause a moment before they create another supplier.

We've been using the solution for two years. We went live early in 2018 and leveraged it throughout 2018 and 2019.

The way that GEP SMART is designed, I don't know if it's truly scalable. It does handle more of the basic purchasing or sourcing of simple, tangible items. That's seamless. But when it comes to buying intangibles such as very complex consulting services, it just doesn't do what we're looking for at this time.

I'm hoping that GEP does invest into it and captures all the categories that their clients procure and try to source. That needs to be addressed as part of their scope.

We have about 500 power users who are procurement people, and we have about 200,000 business users who can log in and search for contracts but they don't have access to the RFPs.

Our previous solution had a very limited scope. We didn't have a full-blown source-to-contract suite implemented. It wasn't apples-to-apples. Some of our campuses didn't have anything at all.

Implementing the technology was pretty straightforward. We took an off-the-shelf approach. 

However, as we were testing, that's where the challenges came in. We were the first client to be on version 2.0. When we were going through the RFP process, it was on 1.0, which was a pretty mature product. As they transitioned to 2.0, they wanted to hit the market so quickly that they overlooked some things and cut some corners. We felt like we were testing their product as opposed to implementing it. That was challenging for us. When we were doing user training, users would say, "Oh, isn't it supposed to be doing this — but it's not doing it?" We had to bring someone in from GEP for all our training, and have them document all the issues that we captured. It wasn't really a training session, but more of a testing session with live users.

It took about six months to go live. But as we were going through hands-on, in-person training, we captured many issues. We didn't do a full deployment until about three months after go-live. So it took about nine months for us to confidently say we had gone live.

We had a GEP consultant onsite for training and deployment.

While they have a service arm that does full implementation and training, we didn't actually purchase that option. The person who was there was more like a backup, help-desk person. In the event that something was not working as intended, he might know more about the technology. He was there for handholding. It was good to have that person there, but I don't know if it was as effective as it could have been because some of the things that we discovered were glitches in the system. At times, we couldn't even move forward.

They kept changing people too. We had about eight weeks of training, although not continuously because we went to different locations. We didn't go to all 35 campuses. Neighboring campuses came to a central location. But by sending different people GEP made it a little challenging because we had to sit with each one and explain all the issues that we were having challenges with. It would have been nice if they had assigned the same person.

We reviewed about 25 suppliers. The finalists, in addition to GEP SMART, were

• Coupa
• SAP Ariba
• JAGGAER
• Apttus. 

Coupa dropped out during the final round. Apttus didn't have a spend module, which was important for us, so they dropped off which left us with the top-three.

The reason we went with GEP SMART was the cost-effectiveness — cost played a big role. All three companies were very closely ranked. Ariba was just too expensive, and JAGGAER is our incumbent supplier, but we didn't feel that they had what we were looking for.

Make sure you test every element of it and make sure any problems are fixed. We communicate with some of GEP's current clients and they don't do enough testing. After they implement it they start discovering things. So do a full testing and full vetting before you roll it out.

Technology-wise, I would give GEP SMART 6.5 out of 10. But the people we work with there are awesome. They understand that they're behind on certain things. They pick those things up and, because they're still a little bit small, they're a nimble organization and are able to quickly mobilize their team and fix things or provide a work-around. I would give their people a 9.5. Even if something is lagging a little bit, having the really great partnership with the folks who are working on our account makes a day-and-night difference. My hat is off to them for having such a good, strong account management team.

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.

There is a bit of hesitation within the organization to completely adopt the system changes. Since there is involvement from various departments, e.g., legal and finance, there are challenges because we already use other systems. If the entire system would be GEP SMART from the beginning, then acceptance would be much better than implementing it in the middle.

The most valuable features are the sourcing and tendering processes.

I haven't had any difficulties when using it. 

Before introducing GEP SMART, we were using all the supplier databases in Oracle Financials. When we implemented GEP SMART, we wanted to do the supplier evaluation online on a real-time basis. We just wanted to give the link, but we faced some problems with the synchronization from GEP SMART to Oracle. Even though we have GEP SMART for the supplier registration, we use Oracle for our delegation of approval (DOA) processes. The DOA process is happening in Oracle Financials. Therefore, each time we register a supplier, it needs to have approval from finance and the business unit as well as the supply chain. Because we pushed the existing supplier database to the newly installed GEP SMART process, we have faced some problems with this function.

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.

We are planning to do the supplier performance evaluation this year, for which they have a module. Last week, we were having a discussion with GEP, and they had sent me a document, but I had to go through it in detail about how it would function in GEP SMART. 

We have been using the solution for more than a year. We went live in December 2020. From January 2021 onwards, we have been using it.

So far, we haven't seen any issues. 

We are not a heavy user of the solution. Due to the nature of our requirements, we use GEP SMART for minor projects because of the involvement from various departments. It would be difficult for us to explain and give training to everyone who needed to use the system with larger projects. Though, some high-value contracts are using GEP SMART. 

We have a total of 25 licenses, mostly assigned to the supply chain team, not the entire organization. These 25 users have full rights. However, there are users who have limited access. For example, a user from the technical department can do certain evaluations online. This does not need full rights. Instead, it has limited transaction details.

They have an excellent technical support team. We have a biweekly meeting with the technical team, where they capture all the issues in a log, then they come back to us with solutions. We can address any issues. If it is an engineering issue, then they will go back to their research and engineering team to fix it. 

Since we are in the oil and gas industry, we have specific, complex requirements due to our global presence. Therefore, it may take time for them to do the customizations since they need to make changes to the global platform. While those customizations may take some time, their response time is much better.

Positive

I have a good knowledge of sourcing software. I have implemented a lot of software and used four programs throughout the years. I have seen that the sourcing process in GEP SMART is easier than in Oracle, SAP, etc. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. 

We had some challenges when we were migrating the existing suppliers to GEP SMART. We also had some issues when uploading the agreements to GEP SMART. For any organization, an agreement will be in different stages. Some of them will be at the half-life of the contract, some of them will be at the beginning, and some of them will be at the end. However, they gave us templates to upload documents, details, etc. Given the details in the template, it was easy to upload the documents and information to GEP SMART.

The deployment took a month. We had the templates, which we used for the details. Globally, there were about 120 contracts and 4,000 suppliers that we deployed initially. So, the deployment didn't take a lot of time. 

In Malaysia, we haven't yet used GEP SMART. Though, they are planning to use it this year. Because of restrictions, we needed approval from the local authority. Even though we implemented all three modules, i.e., vendor management, contract management, and sourcing management, only Abu Dhabi used all three together. Whereas, Thailand and Malaysia were using it in different stages. In Thailand, they initially used the contract management module to upload all their contracts and administer them. Later on, they started to use the sourcing management and vendor management modules.

If our organization could use it as a full-fledged solution, then it would be valuable and give a return on investment. However, since we are not currently using it as a full-fledged solution, even facing some bugs and problems with the synchronization with some of the internal software, we are not able to use it in a full-fledged manner.

We have two types of licenses: 

1. The full license.
2. A license for people who can work in the system but aren't heavy users. 

We evaluated five different software solutions. We looked at Oracle, Aruba, and some solutions developed in our local market.

It is a good solution.

We don't know how possible it is to use the full function of GEP SMART. What we understood from the GEP team is that they have an entire end-to-end process, such as a procure-to-pay process available in GEP SMART. We haven't taken any chances up to now, since we are using this solution for our global platform. For example, we have operations in Southeast Asia, like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, and there are certain restrictions in the system due to required customizations. A lot of customizations are required due to regulatory requirements from Southeast Asia. Therefore, it is not easy for us to completely use the platform. We may use it completely in another two or three years.

We are unable to use their contracting process very well because we need to use contract templates. Unfortunately, our legal team has their own standardized software to use for agreements. They were not ready to accept GEP SMART to work online for reviewing the contracts. So, we tender out to suppliers, and when the supplier comes back to us with any comments on the agreement format, then we will download it and share that with legal, using Outlook to work on it. We haven't used the full-fledged, end-to-end solution because we cannot use it with our legal team.

Rather than going with one or two modules and synchronizing them with a lot of other systems internally, which would be a tough task, you should get the full procure-to-pay solution. Overall, the full-fledged solution can be very good for your organization.

From my experience, I would rate the solution as seven out of 10.

Public Cloud

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.

SMART definitely saves us time when setting up an RFP, on the order of many hours. We have templates set up with our legal-approved terms, NDA, all of the language about the company, the code of conduct. We have our agreements attached to them as well. The team can take them and add in the information that's specific to the project and push things out. They don't need to build it out in Word. Technically, you could take a Word template and do that, but SMART helps with the facilitating of sending it to people. Recipients have to submit their intent to respond; we get that electronically. Before they can open the RFP we get them to sign off an NDA electronically, so there's a time saving there. Any supplier code of conduct or the like, they have to attest to and sign off on that electronically, so we save that step.

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.

The back-end is probably where we see the largest time savings and efficiencies. Sending out an RFP in a Word doc seems really easy. Email it to everybody. They will fill it out and send it back. But then it takes hours upon hours — and I know this from experience — to consolidate and normalize all those responses, trying to get them into a cohesive summary. That can take days' and possibly weeks' worth of work, depending on the size of the RFP. That can be done as soon as it comes back. It's summarized, it's normalized, and it makes the scoring process a lot easier. The setup in the back-end, in particular, is a huge time saver. It could save anywhere from five to 10 hours in a 30-day period.

SMART by GEP has also helped us with diversity spend management.

One of the situations that we had was that our company split in half. We had to work with GEP to clone everything that we have and split it out. So the other half of the company had their version of the GEP tools and we had our version. During that process, our sister company made significant changes to the spend module. Their leader, the VP of procurement, told me that he actually wasn't impressed with the toolset, particularly the spend tool from GEP, and he put it out to bid. As part of the proposal that came back, GEP came up as one of the top-tier candidates.

GEP came in. Tony Butler is an amazing dude. He's really revamped and reinvigorated the organization. He's our relationship manager and he serves us well. So, he got the team together and said, "Hey, how can we make this process better? What can we do"? He went in with ears open, listened, did a needs analysis, came back and said, "Okay, we hear where the issues are. We hear what you want to do. Here's how we can address it." They put a very comprehensive strategic plan together and implemented it. They were able to clean up and rationalize the data. They were able to reduce the cycle time from about 45 days to 14 days.

They were able to get down to level-four reporting, which is very detailed reporting. They didn't have that before. They were able to significantly reduce the number of reporting categories as well.

Now, our sister company is very happy with the data. I actually had a confidential conversation with the VP of procurement and he told me, "We were not happy with these guys and we put out the bid. They came in, they impressed us with their plan, they implemented the plan, and cleaned it up. We have great insights into our data. We have very detailed metrics, now, as a result of their efforts and their strategy." He was thrilled. In fact, they ended up buying more modules because of that. 

So I reached out to GEP and said, "Hey, let's share those best practices because our data is originally from the same source. We have a similar problem to the one that they had. Why don't we use it? Let's not reinvent the wheel. Why don't we employ some of those strategies on our spend?" We're doing that as we speak. I was able to get them in to our new VP of procurement and do that same presentation. We didn't put them out to bid. Now, we're going to talk about what they were able to do for our sister company; how they were able to rationalize and how they were able to save time. We're going to try to employ those same types of things to improve our data. That's a real story of how they were able to really turn things around. They almost lost the business but they turned it around.

In addition, we had an end-of-2019 wrap-up meeting, and 2020 strategy meetings, a couple of weeks ago. We had all of our directors and those above them creating strategies. The IT team, which rolled out the new SMART spend tool was just raving about how great the tool is and about the capabilities. Our spend management expert just couldn't say enough about how great that team was and how they were able to make all these changes quickly. He said that had helped them to really focus on different strategic initiatives for that area. So I can absolutely say it has impacted the organization in a positive way.

Overall, the ease of use of the solution is good. I really appreciate their flexibility, when it comes to the voice of the customer, and their sensitivity. While their tool wasn't the best out of the gate, they continually make updates to it to make their tool best-in-class.

On the spend side, we had some difficulty with the usability, initially, but then they rolled out SMART and they built out a new spend cube, and that was light-years better. Part of the reason I hadn't rolled it out fully to the team was because it wasn't as user-friendly as I would have liked. But they addressed that in a newer version last year.

I rolled it out to a subset of my team earlier this year. It was almost a proof of concept type, phase-one rollout, and it actually went very well. We plan on doing a full-scale rollout training in 2020 for the rest of my category teams. Everybody will be running their own spend reports and using this to manage their businesses.

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. If you're doing a presentation, you have to export it out as Excel, and then you have to go through all this stuff. There is a concept called portlets, which are like an app or a window within a window. If they had a page with four different portlets on it and four quadrants, then each one would be independent and you could run and filter down each individual portlet in each quadrant. That would be beautiful. If you wanted a nice view that has spend data from a particular business unit or a particular region, you could do all of those individual filters on one page as opposed to having to export it to Excel and run four different reports. That's a big one for us.

There is some stuff related to RFP on their roadmap, like the ability to pause an RFP. It could be that you're running an RFP but the business changes; you acquire a company, or the leadership or initiative changes. Instead of canceling and then reissuing, you may want to pause it. That's something we brought to their attention. That's something that may be on their roadmap. They have a track record of making changes and implementing those updates, so I'm sure they'll address that.

We've been using SMART for about 10 years. Our previous senior vice president came over from another company where he was working with SMART and he brought it over to us.

Overall, the stability has been good. We've had some issues with RFPs, suppliers couldn't get in or were having an issue submitting something. That happens occasionally. But that's not a common situation. It's been stable.

From our end, the scalability part is invisible. It's not like we're going to be throwing a few thousand people on it. We're dealing with onesie-twosie users.

We're looking at self-service spend reporting. Our buyers, our category team, will be able to go in and run their own reports. I asked them a question during our department strategy meeting and said, "By a quick show of hands, how many people have access to the reports and run their own reports?" Only one person raised his hand. I'm going to change that.

I inherited the spend. In the past, they would run reports for the team because the data was taking it out of context. The data wasn't inaccurate but it wasn't complete either. Data was counted twice in certain areas. It was a train wreck to give the team access at the time. We're trying to fix the reporting structure, clean up the data, and then we're going to roll it out to the teams so that they can run their own reports. They should be able to manage our business and run reports whenever they want.

We reach out to tech support. Sometimes we'll reach out to our relationship manager or the tech lead for the given tool that we're working with and that we're having issues with.

Tech support could use a little bit more work. We've had a conversation with GEP and they understand it. There were a couple of issues with RFPs where a supplier was having issues. They called and, unfortunately, tech support had them on the phone for an hour. That's a long time. Our concern was that these things weren't getting resolved quickly enough and people were getting frustrated. I had that conversation with the leadership team and I think they've addressed it because I haven't heard much since that point.

There were a couple of things in the tool that were a little bit frustrating. But when we brought it to their attention, I can honestly say — and I have been working with these guys for a long time — almost everything that we've brought to their attention has been put in their development pipeline and worked on and actually implemented. They haven't implemented every single thing, but the majority of it they have, which is pretty phenomenal. Most companies don't do stuff like that.

Their tool has become a much better tool over the years. They take customer feedback very seriously. They look at how the feedback will impact other clients, positively or negatively and, if positively, they will put it into a development pipeline and they'll usually implement.

That's not something you typically hear. It may change every once in a while, but these guys are pretty astounding at taking things as seriously as they do.

It's a good tool. It's a solid tool, depending on which part we talk about. The RFP tool is good. It has a few little quirks, but they've worked them out. They are constantly rolling out updates, which is good.

We have a direct line to their management. They've made some changes by way of staffing levels and tremendously boosted their effectiveness. They have made some really good moves. I've worked with them for a very long time and it's almost a night-and-day difference between then and now. They are sensitive to issues and changes.

We've done the setup in different stages. The earlier version of their RFP tool wasn't great. Not to say it was bad, but it just wasn't great. There were a lot of constraints. But again, they've done a good job of taking customer feedback and making changes. So we had some growing pains with that one. There were also some technical issues at first, but they've addressed most of those. They hop on those things, typically, relatively quickly. 

An example would be the ability to attach large documents. There was a limit and we were sending out a huge RFP or we were going to be getting back huge files. It was for furniture specs, so there were a lot of images and spec documents. We ran into some major issues with a big RFP. We ended up having to use Dropbox and it was really messy. Those were early days. Unfortunately, a couple of people, because of that experience, were soured by the tool. We've upgraded two versions since then. It's gotten better. 

We pretty much have full adoption from our team members to whom it has been rolled out. No pushback. GEP has done a good job of doing the updates. We're going to do a full-scale adoption next year on the spend side. On the spend side, adoption is moderate right now, but it will be full-scale adoption in 2020.

I've used SAP Ariba, as well as Oracle Sourcing and Oracle's spend management. I trained on Siebel, but that was not sourcing. I've used some other tools, like BirchStreet, which is a P2P, and Adecco.

It's been such a long time since I used Ariba. They've been bought by SAP. At the time, their tool was more sophisticated than GEP's tool but it's an unfair comparison. This was back in the early 2000s. I can't really compare the two. I'm sure Ariba is a way different tool now. 

My time using Ariba and my time using SMART are two different time periods in the progression of technology: the reporting technology, communication protocols, etc.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using SMART is that the evolution of technology can be affected by the voice of the customer. It's very powerful.

We have only used the e-auction module twice since we got it. We are trying to get the team to use it, but we don't make anything. We're a hospitality company. There are some things that can be done in e-auction — I'm not saying we can't do anything there — but my team is not really experienced with the e-auction tools. We're trying to get them up to speed and figure out a category where it makes sense to run it through an e-auction tool.

Their AI and machine learning features are one area that I'm highly interested in. I've talked to Tony Butler, our relationship manager, and let him know I want to learn more about it. I heard it about it at a high level. That's something that would help us tremendously because we are a little resource-constrained and we do have repetitive issues with data. I really want a detailed presentation on how GEP is using it because we'd like to potentially leverage that.

In terms of integrating SMART with our ERP, we get a feed. It's not really an integration. We get exports out of those systems which are imported into GEP. It would be nice to have full integration. That would be great. But we're not there.

I have one system administrator on SMART who manages the technical aspect of it. We will have about 50 people using it. The sourcing procurement managers and buyers are facilitating and setting up the RFPs and managing them. And then the stakeholders use it to score them. Those are the guys who might review the RFPs electronically before they go out, and approve them electronically. 

I would rate the solution at eight out of 10. I'm never that guy who always rates 10. I'm very impressed with the solution overall. With the rating of eight, there is room for growth. Maybe, once we implement those AI tools, it might be a nine. Had they not made the recent changes that they made, it would have been more in the seven range.

Their tool wasn't the best out of the gate. They have worked really hard and have been really focused on becoming a best-in-class company and they've been able to do that. They've been at the top of the industry reviews for years now, and that is a result of focused effort, hiring the right resources, as well as trial and error. The main thing that has made GEP successful is being sensitive to the voice of the customer. I can definitely attest to that.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

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.

One of the key functions of the sourcing group is to have a detailed understanding of who we spend money with, how much we spend with them, and what we're buying. It's helped us achieve that objective because we have multiple financial systems and it consolidates all of them for us. It identifies opportunities to save money through our procurement processes.

The fact that it's a single, unified software platform for our whole organization has positively affected our procurement operations because we get a single view of each of our vendors. Unlike some of the other source-to-contract suites, all of the modules are integrated. If we want to look up a particular vendor, we'll be able to see everything about their spend, what contracts we have with them, what sourcing events we invited them to, any of their supplier ratings, any savings that we've achieved around them, and all of that in a single view.

In terms of the efficiency of our procurement processes, in the past we were sending out all of these RFPs through email and they would get stuck in firewalls and we wouldn't have any idea of the progress of the vendors until the due date had arrived. Here, we can see in real-time which vendors have acknowledge receipt. We can see that they are 30 percent done or they're 40 percent done. They can put questions on their bulletin boards that we see, and the other vendors see anonymously. We wouldn't be able to manage these processes manually. Sometimes we invite 20 or 30 vendors for a request for information process to down-select to finalists, and it would be almost impossible to manage without the tool. It saves us days of time. We wouldn't be able to initiate some of our procurement processes without this tool.

It uses AI machine-learning to help us categorize what the vendor does for us and the particular goods or services they have. It looks at various data points and it learns if it's this GL account, the description it should have, and which category that spend should be mapped to. As a result, we understand who the vendors are that are providing fulfillment services or creative agency services. We wouldn't be able to do that without the AI and machine-learning capabilities for the spend analytics solution.

One of the most valuable features is the opportunity-identification through the spend analytics. Another is around the RFX options to benchmark various pre-qualified vendors that are invited to participate.

It has a user-friendly user interface. You don't have to be an IT expert. It's intuitive in terms of drag-and-drop and maximizing the functionality. Everyone who's used it has found it to be user-friendly and beneficial. That is positive.

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.

In terms of additional functionality, most of what we'd like are on the roadmap, like bid optimization functionality. 

Also, some of the modules don't have the same user interface as the others. We'd like to see them all made uniform.

We've been using SMART for about a year-and-a-half.

It has been relatively stable. We had some performance issues in terms of availability this past week, but they were resolved. There were a few days when the performance was spotty for the sourcing module, but they corrected that.

The scalability has been fine.

Particularly on the contracts module, it's underutilized right now, but we plan to expand usage over time.

They are responsive. As soon as we send something, they acknowledge it. There have been a few things that have slipped through, but for the most part they're responsive and they eventually take care of the issue.

We had nothing before this. This is a new, center-led procurement organization. We introduced a whole new team, new processes, and a whole new technology suite. Everything was manual before.

I was brought in to lead the new team and I had used similar technology at my previous employer and realized that we needed to implement it here. We were a small team and had to be as efficient as possible.

The initial setup was straightforward. They did everything for us since it's software as a service. There were regular project meetings and they helped us with integration testing. It went smoothly. The deployment took three months. There were only three people involved from our team, so it wasn't anything significant from that point of view.

The goal was to get it up as quickly as possible so that we could benefit from the efficiencies.

We did not use a systems integrator.

We saw ROI right away, even after the first year. There were cost savings that we validated which were achieved through the tool.

The solution was somewhat comparable to what is on the market. 

There are no other "gotchas." The licensing and maintenance are all in one. There was a project implementation team cost but that was just one time and they didn't overrun.

We engaged about a half-a-dozen vendors, including SAP Ariba, Ivalua, Zycus, and BravoSolution.

We went with GEP because of the single view, their customer service, and the fact that they also have a professional services arm — sourcing and procurement practitioners — that they use in their software development.

It's a huge efficiency tool and it has really accelerated our ability to drive the procurement business case in terms of cost savings.

I would recommend it. We have had some challenges with the contracts module and some performance issues but they recently resolved all those.

We haven't integrated it with our ERP, which is SAP. If we were to implement procure-to-pay, transactional procurement would have to integrate with that.

We don't maintain the GEP solution, we just use it. They're responsible for uptime and ticket resolution. We have biweekly meetings with our customer account manager to review all the enhancements, issues, and improvements. They do all the work for us.

We have about a dozen end-users of the solution.

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.

We brought in a third-party company, Adobe, to do our e-signature. There's an integration there which was very beneficial for us and what we do. And it enables our vendors to not have to log in to the system to sign an agreement. They get a direct email from Adobe, sent from SMART. They can just click on the link and sign it and then it comes back to SMART. That was a huge thing for us. 

The basics of what we use it for and what the product offers work really well for us in terms of contract creation, from beginning to end. Overall, it does what we need it to do. 

Since we only have the two modules, we actually find them both very valuable. It gives us everything that we need for building a contract from scratch and using electronic signatures.

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. On that side it's very easy to use, very straightforward. We don't have a lot of issues in spend.

On the contract side, we have definitely come across a lot of pain points since I've been here. There were some issues with our initial implementation. It wasn't done correctly and it's been a process over a few years to recover from that. There were a lot of lessons learned on their side and our side, and there are still things that we're trying to work through that, maybe, weren't understood properly in the beginning. We're still continuing to try to build it for what we use it for, which is different than what some of their bigger clients may use it for. We've had to do a lot of cleanup and make a lot of changes.

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. These certain items have been bumped up to the president of the company.

In addition, there is a lot of information that we have to put in that is not useful for us, but we have no control over that because it's hard-coded into the program. There's a lot of stuff there that we just don't need or use. It would be better if we were able to turn off all the things that we don't need. The way it is right now makes things seem unclean and not tidy because there's all this information we have to put in that we don't even use. Being able to turn off tabs and fields that other SMART clients use but we don't would be nice, just to simplify it and not have to see them or fill them in.

The company has had this solution for about four-and-a-half years. I came in when it had already been in use for a year-and-a-half to two years. In the past, I still was doing manual agreements and printing paper and having people wet-sign documents. So for me, this is a way better solution than how we did things in the past.

It's hard to say what the solution's stability is like. I feel like it would be nice to start from scratch, because we still have some nagging issues with our categories and certain other things. However, we've made the best of it.

For what we use it for, the basics work great for us. We haven't used the other module. I've never personally used another contract management system, so I have nothing to compare it to.

Overall, SMART's technical support is slow. There has been a lot of miscommunication. There's a time barrier with a lot of the technical support people being in India, as well as a language barrier in understanding.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but it was kind of an ongoing thing, even when I started. There was never an implementation person from SMART who came here to help with implementation. I think that was an issue. Nobody came here, to our Canadian office, or to our US location. So our US officed opted not to use it because the functionality was a bit of a mess.

One of our employees who is no longer here deployed the SMART solution and one of our team leads was involved as well.

Our implementation strategy for the solution, initially, was to get every single vendor we deal with into the system. And if we didn't have the proper information, they put in "dummy information" such as a made-up email address. This caused a lot of issues for us because when you create a profile, the first contact that you put in becomes your primary contact and also holds the username for logging in. Because there was a dummy user email, none of our vendors could log in. There were a lot of phone calls and it caused a lot of issues. On top of that, we did not need all of our vendors in the system, so I'm not sure why that was decided. We really only needed vendor profiles in there for vendors who had a live contract or agreement with us.

We ended up dumping over 4,000 vendors into the system, and it was a nightmare. When I came on board, I spent a lot of time cleaning that up and had GEP delete thousands of profiles. We don't have the ability to delete a profile. They will not give us that ability. So I had to run reports and send them to SMART and have them do mass deletion. But it didn't come easy because they were very resistant to that for the longest time, until we said this is not an option anymore. We want them gone. There was no need to have all those vendor profiles in the system when we didn't even have contracts or agreements with them.

I think we have seen return on investment by going with SMART.

We pay an annual fee but I'm not sure how much it is.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using the solution is around the thinking through of the implementation, having support for that, and doing better planning for it. Most companies have an implementation team and that's definitely the way to do it. If you have to initially, with any program, start manipulating the system by using dummy information, that's probably a red flag.

One of the enhancements that just came out is an idea that came from our group several years ago for a contract and spend integration — bringing in contracts and spend together for reporting. They have always been reported separately. We could report in contract or in spend, but not contract and spend together. They liked this idea, and it's taken them a couple of years to roll it out, but they wanted to roll it out for all their clients. They reprogrammed that into the system and that actually just finally came into production about a week ago, so we haven't had a chance to really use it at this point. But hopefully, we will be able to use it for what we need.

Only supply management is actively using the system here in our Canadian office. We have about 15 to 20 users, mostly on the spend side, and a handful using the contracts side of things. And about three people using it in our US office. Deployment and maintenance of the solution pretty much all falls on me. I'm the admin of our GEP system. Our IT does have admin access as well, but we don't use them, for the most part, for adding or deleting users. It all comes through me.

I don't know how many vendors we have in the system but I would estimate it at 1,000. However, once they do their profile and registration, I would say they don't use it.

Overall, I would give the solution a seven out of ten. It does need some work and there needs to be more flexibility. The big reason we used it was the fact that we could customize a lot of things to fit our needs. However, the system still seems very rigid in how it works, so we've had to do a lot of workarounds. There's definitely room for improvement.