GEP SMART Reviews

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 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.

There are aspects that are probably difficult to measure but I'd like to point to them first. One of them is simply compliance. We are a publicly regulated utility, and along with that comes special controls and compliance features. We've got the SOX controls that everyone else has. The ability to create contracts and set them up through the workflow, and have them available, both as a contract to select from, and as a catalog to pull a material or service item from in the GEP tool in the cloud, is really a benefit that is unique. Users simply cannot get that in our SAP system. 

Our requisition-to-PO time has improved because we've got stock, numbered items set up on contracts and those can be picked from and attached to the requisition and issued automatically.

In addition, we have suppliers that go through the supplier module, which links with SAP, and the reporting on those suppliers for sourcing and for contracts is enhanced. And we are writing interface code between ISNetworld, our third-party safety provider, and GEP to better manage our service contractors.

The source-to-pay, or S2P, functionality has contributed to the digital transformation of our company. The source-to-pay would be sourcing contracts in P2P. We built interfaces between it and SAP to help our buyers do their work more efficiently. For instance, when a supplier receives a purchase order, they can confirm that purchase order through GEP. The interface then comes back into SAP and automatically fills out the SAP confirmation that the supplier received the purchase order. Any change requests are managed through the buyer. The buyer can edit the purchase order and re-issue the PO back to the supplier. A great deal of time is saved because, the old way, the buyer had to print off a fax and then manually go into the purchase order in change mode and add the confirmation manually. That would take five or ten minutes of the buyer's time, so if there were five or six that they were going to confirm, that could easily take a half hour. Now, all that is done automatically through the interface.

In terms of the efficiency of our procurement processes, back in 2015, our buyers were very tactical. Their scope of work was primarily managing requisitions and creating purchase orders. Now, our buyers are able to perform much more strategic work, and can begin to set up automatic purchase orders and work with contracts with the suppliers. That is something which, previously, had only been performed by commodity managers. So the efficiency of our team today is greatly enhanced through GEP.

The solution integrates with our ERP system. It's been built into the flow and the processes, so it's a pretty natural interface right now.

In terms of the solution saving us time when setting up an RFP, if we're going to do a three-bid buy, a simple RFP, it is done in SAP and issued out to the supplier through the portal. If we're going to do a sourcing event, that would be done in the tool. The commodity managers can create an event using the templates and have GEP as a complete repository of all of their events. They can bring in subject matter experts to evaluate the proposals. It's really a nice tool with great features that have improved the efficiencies and been of benefit to the commodity managers for sourcing. We do not have any metrics that really measure commodity manager efficiencies, but we do have general meetings between the director and the leadership and the commodity managers to evaluate their progress and understand what strategic things they're working on. Through that, the leadership can see whether we are where we think we should be in terms of managing the projects that we have.

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.

I do not know how they could get better in spend. That's a pretty great module.

We could probably take advantage of some of their available wizards and develop some intake efficiencies for the process so that it's not quite as much just data entry and creating certain profiles. We have not gone into the 2.0 version. The whole dynamic and interface between the modules may be improved or it may be the same thing that just looks a little bit different.

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. I'm interested to see how that might work.

We went live in 2015.

In today's market, the stability into the future can change with a phone call in the next hour. However, the growth that the business side of GEP has achieved over the course of the last five years, and their client-centric view of their business and business model, are things that give me confidence that they will be stable for the future, and for years to come.

It has scalability from a tiny micro-business all the way up to a multinational, multicultural mega-company. I know with their clients that they are able to cover some of the largest companies in the world, as far as scalability goes. I don't know if they would market down to the tiny businesses, ones with less than ten people, but from what I've seen, they definitely could.

In our company there are roughly 500 to 600 users who have a login to the tool. The vast majority of them are subject matter experts who are going to review a contract. There are also contract approvers, and then there are people from legal, people from risk, and some people from accounting. Within supply chain there are users in the leadership, as well as administrators, buyers, and commodity managers. Maintenance is relatively small. We don't have very much IT impact anymore; that only happens on enhancements. So maintenance is one or two people and they're from IT.

We are looking to add more contracts and catalogs, and we are looking to potentially utilize the tool as a corporate-wide repository for all of our contracts.

Technical support is pretty good. It got better once we got a steady-state customer service representative.

The customer service through the implementation was phenomenal. But once we went live, we weren't sure who we should call. We weren't going to call the main contact for the module anymore. We started to go through the general service desk and sometimes the answer didn't come back like we expected it to come back. We just didn't understand. And we didn't know who to go to. Back in 2017, they recognized the gap and developed within their organization a steady-state customer service department. That has really helped steady that aspect of their customer service.

The customer service rep is typically located in your time zone. That person has become a great resource for us. We have a weekly meeting set up just to talk about and look at the calls that have come in during the last week, and any open action items that we're working on.

In addition, every year GEP conducts a product advisory-council session. Their top clients all come in and meet. That is something that could be fairly controversial for some providers. But GEP welcomes that input and fosters that environment and relationship with its main clients because they want to hear what the thoughts are that are out there, and they want to get better. They want their product to be better because of that cooperative type of environment. They bring us all together in a big room and we talk about their stuff.

We did not really have a previous solution. For spend, we used Excel and pulled tables from SAP. But we had nothing close to the tool that we've got now. The supplier module was managed inside SAP with an Excel profile template. For the sourcing module, we did have Iasta but we discontinued that relationship; GEP replaced it. We had a home-grown contracts repository and workflow, but that was pretty ineffective, much less effective than GEP.

The initial setup was very complex. We did not have a large team on the implementation so it felt like it progressed slowly. Overall, the deployment took about a year-and-a-half.

Our implementation strategy initially started as a "big bang," but we quickly realized that that wasn't going to be doable, given the amount of work and training and the conversions of the processes needed. We had two project managers on the implementation who quit and moved on before I ever really became involved in the implementation. So the project was on its third project manager, and I went through the third, fourth, and fifth project managers before we got it implemented.

I have made a very flat declaration that I would not advise that type of process to anyone who tries to implement an across-the-board system like this. They need to have a dedicated team. Those resources need to be made available to the team for subject matter experts, and then training and culture change. Whether it's the ADKAR model or something else, experts in that, in their organization, need to be brought along with the implementation team.

We did not have a third-party come in. We had our own IT and our own project manager, and the supply chain group working on the modules themselves.

We had a budget item that got nixed from our budget in 2010 and 2011 and then it finally passed in 2013. We started a sourcing event. I was not part of the sourcing event but we looked at some ten to 15 service providers and roughly half of those are no longer in business anymore. The sourcing event on our side had criteria that evaluated the marketplace which had to do with cost, quality, scalability, flexibility, ease of doing business, and growth with us. It came down to SAP Ariba and GEP and we decided on GEP.

It's very important to have people who understand the depth of the technical aspects of their processes and how their systems work. Also, there needs to be a keen understanding and awareness of what the regulatory requirements are of their processes, what their key controls are. If those members are not on that team, there can be some real problems within a year if there are regulatory requirements that are not addressed in the day-to-day operation of those systems.

As for the adoption of the platform in our company, initially, we were pretty hesitant and resistant to change. But when people started to use it they really started to like the tool. It has taken a while, and the contracts module is probably the very last one to really get adopted. We've been pretty attached to it for the last two years and it is generating momentum to become the corporate-wide contracts repository for all of our corporate contracts, not just those created to work in supply chain. So that is a tremendous win, culturally, for adoption with the tool.

The experience is probably different for every single user, but I like how fast the tool is. The response time is great. It is so fast through the cloud. They've really been able to maximize that. The spend module is just fascinating with how fast it is.

Inside the procurement functionality of supply chain, we put our purchase orders to our suppliers through the portal, through GEP. We can write contracts and approve and execute those contracts through the GEP system. But SAP is where we would create the purchase order and release it in SAP. So we do not create purchase orders or do goods receipts or service entries in GEP. We do that in SAP. 

The fact that the GEP solution is a single, unified software platform for our company has had a positive effect, but it is not our single solution because we interface with SAP. An example of how it has affected our company is that our spend analytics are all in one place. My director sent me a message at something like 6:30 in the evening, when he was at a dinner, and asked me our spend with a certain supplier. I was able to get onto GEP and send him a snapshot of the spend in a matter of moments. The difference between GEP and our previous models is that, back then, he might have asked three different people and gotten three different answers. With GEP, it's going to be the single answer that is correct, because it's consistently pulling from the tables.

The solution's AI and machine-learning features have not affected our procurement processes at this point. We're looking at that from an accounts-payable standpoint, managing and processing invoices, but not on the procurement side.

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.