GEP SMART Reviews

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

We're doing two-way matching for our invoices and purchase orders, and those invoices do not have to be reviewed by our AP function. That takes that workload off them. It saves them time, although it's hard to say how much at this point.

There is also a lot more visibility into purchase-order, invoice, and spend data. That allows us to compute things which are adding to our accruals process on our month-end, so we can be a lot more accurate on what is owed, what's been paid, etc. The spend function has helped our procurement organization identify likely areas in procurement where we can drive value.

The fact that GEP is a single, unified software platform for our whole organization certainly unifies the information in one place. Since it's cloud, we can fairly easily grant access to whomever we need to grant access, to be able to leverage that data. Similarly, we have a very wide and dispersed user forum for procure-to-pay and it's something that we can quickly give them access to, including our purchasing catalog, with very minimal training. It's very intuitive for them if they've ever ordered from the web.

In addition, the solution is one of the keystones for our digital transformation. We have a larger project where we're also moving our ERP to the cloud, and this has been cited as one of the key functions to enable that. SMART is very well integrated so any design that we have for procure-to-pay has to keep that in mind, as we integrate with our financial system. That's blueprinted as part of our program.

In terms of the efficiency of our procurement process, the key is the invoicing piece. Also, the ability to interface directly with our suppliers and have them invoice us directly gives them more access to what they need to submit their invoices, returns, and credit memos. And any changes in pricing are immediate, so they can send things directly to us or interface directly in SMART and make pricing changes when necessary. We can distribute those to our customers or our users very quickly.

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."

A lot of the things in the system are not client-facing. So we weren't able to edit certain types of master data, and we're relying on them to edit it for us. I assume it's partly how it's designed and that it's also a safety net that we're not able to essentially ruin our installation. So it's understandable. But there are some components that we would like to have a little more control over.

And there are things regarding how the process for procure-to-pay works that differ slightly from how we do things, but that's expected with an out-of-box-solution.

As an organization, GEP is very technically capable. Very recently, they implemented a customer success team to manage our expectations and communicate them to their technical team. That function is relatively new and some work needs to be done to build that connection so that it's a little more seamless. They need to be managing our requests for enhancements and our requests for fixes with their engineering team and getting anything that needs to be fixed, fixed. 

We've been officially deployed with GEP for about 18 months. There was a long leading-in period of implementation, due to the fact that there were some integrations and changes to our organization and source systems for several years before that.

The stability is fine. As expected, it gets complex. It's going to be dependent on local internet speeds and it's hard to peel away actual server issues. But things that we've identified as actual server issues have been few and far between.

It is definitely scalable and we're illustrating that by the number of users we're putting it to. It scales well.

We have plans to increase usage. We focused, during our initial deployment, on what our core materials would be, which, in our industry, would be janitorial supplies. With that, we have adoption rates depending, on the industry of 60 to 80 percent, and that's good. As we start moving out into other stuff, such as services and corporate functions, we'll monitor that as well. Those teams will tend to be more technically able, so we don't expect as much pushback on those.

They help us manage the technical support. Customer service and technical support are relatively closely linked. 

Due to mergers and acquisitions, one of the companies we merged with had Coupa. So we're actually currently maintaining two procure-to-pay systems for our legacy organizations. That will go away once we move to our cloud-based financial system, which is coming in the next few months. But we have experience with Coupa as well.

Coupa seems to have a lot more resources to work with, and that that comes with the price — and that's the balancing act. Also, they are a lot less willing to compromise or design outside a system or do workarounds with customers. With them, what you get out-of-the-box is what you get out-of-the-box, with some configuration. One of their strengths, because of their resources, is that have time to do things that other procure-to-pay organization can't. For example, they have level-two or level-three punchouts from Amazon. They seem to be able to push that around or even potentially make it exclusive, which other companies might not be able to do. But that's paired with the fact that they're a little more difficult to work with and design out a system which fits a specific business.

The initial setup was complex because we made it complex. When we kicked off, we were dealing more directly with an engineering team. That engineering team was very lax in not helping us improve our process before we put it into a system like SMART. Because of that, it introduced complexity which we didn't need to have in the system. As we work more closely with them, and better understand our requirements — and they understand our requirements through their customer success team — we're able to make it more an out-of-the-box experience and less about workarounds. That would have been more helpful to do on the front-end. They're better suited right now to be able to help customers do that.

Our implementation strategy was to focus on a pilot group. We selected a medium-level branch of ours in Florida and really ran through the system to make tweaks to it before we rolled it out. We then rolled it out through our industry groups and geographically, in stages throughout 2018.

Altogether the deployment took about nine-plus months. Our core implementation team included about eight to ten people, but there was a strong SMU support team, particularly with IT and procurement, which might have been another ten to 15 people. We have a large organization with the number of potential users in the tens of thousands, with a lot of connections to our business. So we needed to manage all that.

The way the implementation is going, we're focusing on users who were identified as prepositioners and that's in the single-digit thousands. But as we push out, we're likely to be adding more.

In terms of maintenance, right now we lean on about five to ten folks who are dedicated to the process. The fact that there is a lot of transactional data, when there are reconciliations and things like that to do, means it requires a larger team.

We're working on the model for ROI. It's difficult because the ROI on this will involve FTEs and time-based savings. To truly do it would mean headcount reduction, which is something that we haven't done yet. But I have the feeling that it's saving time. We haven't done a robust calculation of the time saved by it, but the savings are currently on the AP function and some others.

Pricing is module-based.

The biggest lesson we've learned is that, for customers who are looking to go down a procure-to-pay path, they really need to be sharp on their blueprinting and make sure that all the requirements are clearly defined and carved in stone. If any sort of consolidation or process improvements need to be done, they should be done before engagement with GEP, because GEP's goal, at least during our integration, is to get through it, not necessarily get it right.

It is a very transactional system, and you have to be set up for it. That's especially true regarding keeping track of all the orders and invoices. Be honest with yourself on what that that staffing needs to be.

In terms of the adoption of the solution within our organization, as with anything new, you get pockets of people who are resistant. But those are definitely balanced by pockets of folks who found it to be second nature; they didn't have any issues. We're definitely siding on folks who find it relatively easy. One thing about our user group is that they can be, depending on who we're talking about, relatively nontechnical and unskilled. That presents a barrier for this. But the fact that they are, in general, able to get it, speaks to the fact that procure-to-pay, in general, is meant to be relatively easy.

SMART's AI and machine-learning features haven't yet affected our procurement processes, but I expect they will very soon, knowing that things like OCR are coming down the pipeline over the next couple of months. They also have what I believe are called "buyer desks" and those things are very dependent on AI. We're very eager to see how those will interface with how we do business. OCR is kicking off over the next couple of weeks, and implementation is through the end of the year, leading into 2020. I'm not sure when the other stuff is due to come online.

Overall, I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. They're very strong technically. They are now set up with a very strong customer support function. There were growing pains on both our side and their side. But it's definitely workable and they've been a very good partner as we have moved into this space.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

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

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

It has consolidated a couple of different spend avenues that we have. Our accounting team, our finance team, and procurement used to have three different realms in which we would look at the spend information. We would get fairly close, but not as close as we would like. GEP has helped gather the spend from those different arenas and put them into one, singular case so that we can compare apples to apples each month.

It's given us greater visibility to all-spend. It's helped with the classification of spend. We can look at things based on GLs, but it's allowed us to classify spend so that we can look for opportunities to save, as a procurement team.

In terms of that classification, the AI tool definitely has learned from the information we've given it but also from some of the corrections that we've made. It may have auto-applied a classification and then we have gone in and corrected it, given it some feedback. With that, more and more, we are not having to touch the information once it gets processed. It's classifying it from the get-go in the correct category. That helps us because it allows each of our procurement managers in different departments to really see everything that's in their realm, without having to look for mistakes or nuances. It's become fairly knowledgeable.

It has given us visibility, and we'll see historical data, whenever we are creating an RFP. It does give us a better insight as to all the spend in that category. We can formulate future project requests more clearly.

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.

We didn't like their dashboard initially, but they responded to that very well. They've given us some customizable dashboards and have also made it so that the dashboards can be exported into PDF and other formats, so that we can share them with the rest of the company, people who are not necessarily users on GEP. That was a weakness at the beginning, but one that they have responded to adequately and we're really pleased with the result.

I've been using SMART for about two years. The organization has been using it for two-and-a-half years.

We have not had any significant crashes. We've had minor bugs, but their customer service has been really strong and they've responded, each time, very quickly and given us fair timelines as to when they expect to have it up. They are usually right on time with those timelines for fixing bugs. We have not had any significant stability issues, just small ones with tweaking. It's mainly when there have been upgrades. They've come out with a new version and they have had a couple of bugs. They responded quickly to those.

We implemented the tool at a time when we were tripling in size as a company. They've been able to handle a massive increase in data fairly well. In terms of users, we haven't changed much since we first implemented it. We have about ten users. Each of them is a procurement manager over a different spend category, mainly in the indirect realm but a couple of them are in the direct materials realm as well.

We have some plans to increase its usage in the future. We met with them recently just to discuss what additional resources and tools they offer. We're not subscribed to every bell and whistle they have. We're strongly considering what it would be like to increase the number of tools and more fully use the services that they offer.

I deal with both first-tier tech support and our account manager. We filter a lot of our requests and information through him and he's been great.

We did not have a previous solution.

I was not part of the integration of it into our system. I came onboard about six months after they had done that.

It's fairly easy to use. There was a short time period for onboarding SMART, where GEP gave plenty of instructional training. And they've provided some good responses to questions, as I have continued to learn. But I and my team find it could be fairly quickly adopted.

To fully understand what the product offers took a month's time, but that was because there were a number of different tools and tricks within the software. There were multiple things that we had to learn.

There has been fairly good adoption of the solution in our organization. I'm one of the main, super-users. In a lot of cases, my colleagues have relied upon me to find the information for them because I am in it daily. They feel comfortable using the tool as well, but not to the degree that I do. They've been good users of the tool, but because this is my specific role, they've simply relied upon me for that usage.

There are two other teammates of mine who help in maintaining the tool. They are also procurement managers.

We have seen a return on investment, both in the direct materials and indirect material realms. Whenever we get a line-item price variance, we've seen some ROI in terms of being able to capture when pricing has changed and wasn't what was contracted. We've also seen it in terms of the payment-terms analysis. There's a monetary value to that.

It has definitely saved time. Before, we were bringing financial information from three different systems and that was laborious. GEP does it for us now.

The costs are all built-in.

We have found it to be a beneficial program with a lot of different resources that we still have yet to explore. I don't think we've tapped out yet on what it offers.

Through using GEP, we've been able to gain respect. The other departments in our company have come to rely upon us even more. We have become a more trusted department within the company, among our peers, because we can speak to their spend at greater depth.

It is not currently connected with our ERP system, but that's something that we have discussed with GEP as a possibility in the future.

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.