GEP SMART Valuable Features
CK
reviewer1251063
Sr. Manager, Procurement & Systems Support at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The spend module is the most valuable. After that would be sourcing and contracts.
Spend gives us a way to put all of our spend in one area and use a category hierarchy to pull real-time spend data. We have it updated every single month. It used to take months for us, where we used really old data by getting giant, raw data fields pulled out of SAP from our controller. The spend module helps us with our analysis, and gives us the ability to be able to communicate with our shareholders on particular projects. We can identify spend and areas of opportunity for process improvement, saving, etc.
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 in contracts, or if you want that word in sourcing, or related to a supplier. It's pretty simple to use. There are some things in the sourcing-auctions module that are a little bit more complicated, but the training wasn't very difficult.
Our spend team uses the AI and machine learning. We approve it each month. We look at any new suppliers to make sure they're categorized correctly but they do use the machine learning to make sure that the rules fall within our category tree mapping.
View full review »SB
Sheila Bridge
Senior Director at True Value
The one we use the most is the sourcing module, sending requests for information or requests for quotes or proposals to our vendors. We use that quite a lot.
It's really easy to use. You don't have to train vendors. You can add a new vendor at any time, and that vendor will get an email saying, "You've been selected to participate in our RFP, and you do X to get your ID set up." That works really well.
Another thing I am really happy with is that you pay for the super-users but you don't pay for the vendors. You can have as many vendors as you need, to do what you need to do. They're all-inclusive with the price that you pay for the subscriptions for the super-users, who are typically the people in my company who are putting together the requests and putting them out there.
It also gives you an opportunity to evaluate multiple vendors' responses to the questions. You can actually compare them in one view where you can see each question and what each vendor has responded to. That's a great way to do it rather than trying to do it on spreadsheets.
View full review »CJ
ChristinaJones
Senior Product Manager at a university with 10,001+ employees
SMART has been helpful for sourcing and public bids. For regulatory purposes, our university posts bids, depending on the scope of the bid. We get a lot of value out of SMART's ability to post to a public site and have suppliers see that information, register in the tool, and participate. SMART features for collecting information and its timeline capabilities are highly useful. Then on the contract side, the reporting capabilities are the most valuable. Our use case focuses primarily on post-execution and lifecycle management, so it's essential to be able to report accurately especially compliance-related reports.
SMART is easy to use, especially when reporting. It isn't designed for a hardcore analyst. You don't need to have a background in analytics to run reports, which is huge. I realized I hadn't touched too much on the spending side, but we use SMART for all spending analytics, and any commodity manager procurement professional can go in and run a spending report. That was a business decision to restrict who can run reports since that data can be exported and used. But the reporting capabilities are incredibly easy to use.
LB
reviewer1692825
Sourcing Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
The project model is used by most of the people in our company. It is where the official savings reports are generated.
Online sourcing is the most valuable feature for us, although we use all of the features.
We use the source-to-contract (S2C) functionality and our procurement excellence team is helping other procurement teams in different countries to use this platform. It makes them more efficient and more digitized through the source-to-contract process. Essentially, it helps us to digitize certain sub-processes.
BH
reviewer1202295
Procurement Analytics Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
We operate with three different systems that input data. The fact that GEP consolidates all that information into one place is a big deal for us. It streamlines that data for us.
There are also some AI tools that GEP uses in helping us find opportunities. That has been beneficial as well.
LB
reviewer1196841
Manager Strategy, Resource, and Supply Chain at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I don't really tend to rank the features, but the portal from the supplier experience is dramatically updated and brought into this century from the old fax transmission and even Write Fax.
The spend module is really amazing and lightning-fast. It can give even the most novice of analysts access to the information needed and the ability to tweak it the way they want to see it. It has a lot of flexibility.
And the dashboards can collect all of that information and be repeatably produced almost instantaneously and can be set up in the background.
The supplier module really unlocks the sourcing and the contract modules.
We really like the contract module because it gives us an established workflow. For those people that love to have established processes, it's great. For people who want to be renegades and do what they want and "speed down the interstate" and make the rules up as they go; those people aren't going to tend to like an established process that they are confined to. But with the workflow that we developed, there's still a lot of flexibility, and the contract owner still has the ability to manage the contract through the workflow pretty effectively. I think we've got a nice, established process with an established workflow, but still have the flexibility so something doesn't get stuck for a week just because one person is not available.
In terms of ease of use, GEP has done a lot of work through its enhancements over the years to make the user experience more intuitive. There is a more standard-Amazon-like experience, where manuals and tutorials are not really required because the user experience and what's on the screen are pretty intuitive. Even basic users can utilize the tool because it's pretty easy and straightforward. They've incorporated those concepts throughout all their modules.
View full review »MG
Reviewer57736
Senior Manager at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
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.
In terms of ease of use, for the most part, it is what I would call "standard" for procure-to-pay software. Of course, with any system, there are quirks and we are working through those, but it's largely "as expected."
View full review »DG
Reviewer4401
Senior Legal Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
I love it because everything is done within the contract module. The previous tool that we had really acted more as a repository, whereas this is the lifecycle. Once a business owner gets to the point where they want to enter into a contractual relationship with a party, from that point, including the drafting of it through to the signature on it, it covers the lifecycle. It's from the beginning to the end to even the archiving. It's all done within the tool, including e-signature. Rather than having negotiation and revisions and different versions outside of the tool and using it as a filing system, everything is done within the tool. It's more transparent. Anyone who needs to see what's going on can see it. It saves a lot of time for people trying to track things down. I love it.
It's so intuitive. Version 2.0 is head-and-shoulders above what 1.0 was. It's a lot more user-friendly. I like to call it "Google-ish." The search mode makes more sense. It's more what people are used to. I think it's super-easy to use.
I'm doing less and less training, which means that when I train, people get it. And when I do my education session, you can see the light bulbs going on. I'm not training as much because it's a lot easier to understand. They provided really detailed, quick reference guides for us this time, that make sense. That's been really helpful.
View full review »KR
reviewer1254915
Associate Director, Sourcing and Contracts Technology at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »MP
reviewer1754217
Sr. Contracts Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
The most valuable features are the sourcing and tendering processes.
I haven't had any difficulties when using it.
View full review »DD
reviewer1255713
Director, Supply Chain / Design & Construction Technology at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »LP
reviewer1202637
Executive Vice President, Head of Procurement at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »PM
Contract165b
Contracts Administrator, Supply Management at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
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.
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