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GEP SMART vs Oracle Procurement Cloud comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
668
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
GEP SMART
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Procurement Software (3rd), Contract Management Software (8th)
Oracle Procurement Cloud
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Procurement Software (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
it_user1709418 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Product Manager at a university with 10,001+ employees
Doesn't require a background in analytics to run reports
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.
KM
Associate Director Delivery at Apps Associates
Highly customizable, scalable and seamlessly integrates
Off late, most of my customers, where I see a trend, are long-standing heavily customized major customers on ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) on EBS who want to convert themselves to the cloud, and they expect us to provide the same level of customizations that EBS supports them in the cloud. So that's the challenge where we are currently. We have a few strategic advisory accounts like that, and we are evaluating those customizations to see how we can plug them as part of the solution offering so that the customer retains their current custom behavior and they don't have to deal with too many changes with their users. And that's the biggest change that we are working on. And there is a bundle of such initiatives that we do internally. Custom roles are one such thing. There are several areas of improvement. In the procurement cloud, we have today the landed cost management, where there's a lot of flexibility, which has been given on the cloud side in terms of costing. So the license and pricing have become a little complex area. And then auto management has completely changed in the cloud, the way the pricing strategy has been. It's been more complex and more flexible in the cloud. So that's the second area where we see challenges. These two, plus yes, now with self-service procurement, the dynamics have changed in global procurement, where the corporate will do the billing and invoicing, and we can do it from any big use, placing purchase orders and all that, the consolidation and the dynamics of testing. So these are some of the things which have greater flexibility, but at the same time, there is complexity in terms of implementation. We try to implement everything within the same window of the same customer window of six months. In future releases, I would like to see the idea of automating the period close process, which would be beneficial for sustenance after go-live. It is more like sustenance, both go live. If there is a mechanism where the period close can be automated, or it can be if the product can come up with a dashboard specifically for that, which ties with the sequence of the sub-ledgers, what are the conflicts to close the sub-ledger areas to facilitate and close the ledger area? Which consumer buying? That's one initiative or one idea that I'm thinking about. There are quite a few like that, which are more from the sustenance standpoint, more than the implementation standpoint.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Compared to other tools like NICE and Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere is the only tool that gets your work completed in half the time."
"We have had a very good experience with Automation Anywhere and we are very happy with the solutions."
"Even a non-IT or business user can just look at the bot language and understand what the bot is doing, and that's the easy part."
"Automation Anywhere has eliminated the manual intervention from us by automating the entire onboarding process and the checking on the new suppliers and tour operators."
"IQ Bot is a valuable feature. It processes unstructured data to structured data. It helps me by making tasks less time consuming. It reduces the effort it takes versus manually."
"It is a great product."
"Automation Anywhere RPA has enabled a lot of our employees to have their valuable time freed up to do other things, ranging from the Treasury department, the Revenue department, General and Cost Accounting."
"The most valuable feature is the screen recorder, which helps to automate processes easily."
"The fact that GEP is a single, unified software platform for our whole organization certainly unifies the information in one place."
"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, simply because the user experience and what's on the screen are pretty intuitive."
"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 sourcing module is a place we can always go to find all the information we submitted to a vendor and what they submitted back to us, and it is really meaningful and effective in getting that information out to the vendors."
"It's a huge efficiency tool and it has really accelerated our ability to drive the procurement business case in terms of cost savings."
"In summary, using this solution benefits our organization through cost savings, better efficiency, improved transparency, and having information archived."
"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."
"I have seen that the sourcing process in GEP SMART is easier than in Oracle, SAP, etc."
"Oracle is suitable for those large enterprises that heavily rely on customizations."
 

Cons

"We're in a digital world where everything's evolving. AI is coming out, so just looking at keeping moving, introducing new innovations into the product, nothing specific. The Automation Anywhere teams seem to know what the customers want."
"Object cloning is a component of the solution that seems to be unstable, as it apparently stops working for no reason."
"The object cloning that exists cannot capture 80 percent of the objects that we need it to capture."
"We'd like to see more AI features."
"We would like to see more options for merging and un-merging PDFs. More flexibility there would be good. We've figured out ways around this and, using their software, we've been able to do everything we wanted to do. It just took a bit more time to do it. We were on version 10.5 and in their Bot Store they actually had a bot that did exactly what we wanted to do, but it was for Version 11.0."
"In the next release of this solution, I would like to see a plug-and-play tool for NLP programming."
"We had a major issue when it came to single sign-on. We couldn't get it working."
"The bot creation process is straightforward in some ways and complicated in others. You can get your initial stuff laid out really quick, but then putting in your exception handling is more time consuming."
"Tech support could use a little bit more work."
"There are certain things within the contracts module — how to upload the line items, for example — that could be done to make that utility a little more user-friendly, a little more like the sourcing module."
"One of the areas where they could do better is by creating more standard templates when it comes to IT cost. IT cost has various components to it and if I want a vendor to be able to reply about cost related to IT, I would have to create that template. If I want them to tell me the hardware costs, the software costs, the professional services costs, the cloud or subscription costs, etc., I would have to build that template myself. Once I built it, I could save it and use it again and again. But sometimes building a template takes a lot of time."
"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 didn't like their dashboard initially, but they responded to that very well."
"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'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."
"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."
"Off late, most of my customers, where I see a trend, are long-standing heavily customized major customers on ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) on EBS who want to convert themselves to the cloud, and they expect us to provide the same level of customizations that EBS supports them in the cloud. So that's the challenge where we are currently."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We're paying a monthly subscription fee for the bot and for services. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee."
"The cost of Automation Anywhere is high in Turkey due to the weak economy."
"The solution is quite expensive. Not every organization can consider this option."
"The initial setup and licensing fees are high, and although it saves costs in the long run, reaching the break-even point can take at least six months."
"We have saved time and money using this solution."
"Its cost is good."
"No one is balking at the cost. They are market rates and will change, but no one is saying, "That is ridiculous or impossible." They are saying, "Show me the ROI and prove that the cost is accurate.""
"The pricing that we received from Automation Anywhere in the beginning was very economical for us. We've seen a lot of benefit from what we spent to what we're receiving. From the beginning, it's been a very low-cost implementation for us."
"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."
"My advice is to think wisely when it comes to estimating the number of licenses that you will require. If you settle on a number too early and you need additional ones, then the extra licenses might be quite expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
13%
University
8%
Media Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business162
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise565
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise14
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
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Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
SMART by GEP
Procurement Cloud
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Exxon Chevron Macys
BUYDEEM, Capgemini, Asahi Refining