GEP SMART Reviews

There are two university systems within our state. In the two systems together, we have a total of 35 campuses. We use GEP SMART as more of an upstream, front-end procurement software. We don't have a full P2P installed. We only use it to facilitate requests for quotes, requests for proposals, and requests for information. When the sourcing event is done, we leverage the GEP SMART contract module to store fully-executed contracts. 

We also leverage the supplier management module, but that is only to facilitate sourcing events. We don't use it as a full supply-relationship management tool.

We do use their spend to run analytical reports and for opportunity-finding. 

It is a SaaS solution for us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We use it for everything from source to contract. We're not using any P2P, but we use it for all of our spend analysis, all our RFXs, managing and tracking savings, and we use the supplier database strictly for contract and other sourcing events. We also use the contract repository and have automatic notifications set up for 30, 60, 90, and 120 days for every contract.

The spend module is helpful because, while the way we used to do it didn't take a lot of time, we were waiting on data. We'd only get it a couple of times a year and there would usually be a pretty big lag in the data. It would be last year's. We didn't have very fresh data. Now, we get our spend refreshed every single month.

Another big area where it has improved our organization is contracts. We get automatic alerts about them and we're able to see every contract that's coming up. When we get a notification, 120 days in advance, we'll send a note to the owner of that contract or the signatory or the team that's involved and say, "Hey, this contract's coming up in a couple of months. What do you want to do? Do you want to continue it? Do you want to renew it? Do you want to go out to a competitive bid?" It's a good way to kick off those conversations.

A lot of times our stakeholders have no idea when contracts are actually coming up. The worst thing that can ever happen is that you have a contract that you want to get out of but it just renewed 30 days ago. It's then so much more of a pain to try to get out of it. 

It definitely helps our procurement process to be more efficient but it depends on how you define procurement process. It definitely helps streamline our internal processes for managing our projects, but we're not reusing the projects module and then actually putting in dates or timelines. But the way it works, on contracts and sourcing, we're able to see, during an RFP, who has participated or who is planning to participate, and the percentage of RFP completion.

When an RFP is due in a week and we're sitting at zero percent, we can make those calls and send those reminder emails. That's as opposed to sending out an RFP via Excel where all you can do is hope you get it back by the due date. In that scenario, if the due date comes up and you didn't receive anything, you send it to the vendor and they might say, "Oh, I never saw this," or whatever the excuse may be. We now have a little bit more transparency into what they have. We can see if they logged on to the system and if they spent some time in the RFP, which definitely helps keep things on track throughout the sourcing process.

The solution also helps us save time when setting up an RFP. We're able to templatize things. With templates, you have to be very careful to not miss something though, so that you're not bringing something in from an old RP where the language wasn't relevant and may confuse people. We typically try to build a lot of them mostly from scratch, but we can bring in questions or guidelines that are relevant.

We're leveraging SMART for four of their modules. We use it for sourcing, contracts, suppliers, and spending. However, we're not leveraging it for procurement to pay the downstream operations based on our current technical infrastructure. The most common use cases stem from procurement on the sourcing side for a need to go out to bid. And then on contracts, flipping those sourcing events to a contract or the awarded RFPs. For contracts, any master agreement that we do is also added into SMART. It's mainly used as a post-execution lifecycle management tool on the contract side. Based on our kind of utilization and desire, we have pre-execution capabilities enabled, but based on the maturity of our organization, we are actively leveraging it in that manner.

SMART's source-to-pay feature has helped us undergo a digital transformation. We're only using upstreams and not the procure-to-pay side of SMART but it has definitely transformed our operations. It's encouraging us to streamline, especially as we leverage functionality with e-auctions and more of the authoring capabilities that SMART has already. It's continuing to transform our organization.

SMART also helps with standardization, especially on the RFX side, by providing standardized templates. However, even though we're not fully leveraging SMART's authoring capabilities, we have the latest templates, which is huge from a compliance perspective. SMART's AI and machine learning capability has made a difference, especially on the spending side. We have  10 ERPs across our organization, and GEP's robust AI/ML can normalize our suppliers and categorize our spending across those 10 source systems. That's been huge in terms of our ability to analyze spending across our entire organization appropriately.

Having a single unified software platform has simplified our procurement operations. Before leveraging SMART we didn't have a single system on the contract side to manage our file folders, file cabinets, shared drives, etc. It was antiquated before. Having a single system with high visibility across the system has allowed us to increase our collaboration and our purchasing power because we're able to leverage our economies of scale better.

We primarily use it so that we can do sourcing with suppliers. We're able to send out notices to our suppliers to say, "We have an RFP or an RFI or an RFQ that we want you to bid against." We use it to collect their input and evaluate what we're getting to decide which vendor we will use in the particular situation.

That process requires that we have both the sourcing module and the supplier management module. The supplier management module is where we keep track of our suppliers and we can communicate across the platform to the supplier in multiple ways. We can send information back or get information from them, rather than go through email.

The third module is the spend analysis module. That is where we're able to evaluate how much we spend on different vendors, both from a CapEx and an OpEx perspective, year over year. We're able to say, "This is how much we spent with vendor A in 2017, 2018, and 2019." We use that information both to see whether that spend is increasing or decreasing, and primarily, so that we have the ability to see those spends and determine whether we want to push more at a particular vendor or less.

We're also using it for auctions. We're able to send out information to all the vendors for a particular product and say, "You have X amount of time to respond, and we want to see who's got the lowest price." They can't see each others' bids, so they have to sharpen their pencils to be able to win.

Some of the reasons we went with a solution like this were 

• to keep everything in one place
• to have a tool that helps us facilitate sourcing 
• to facilitate some of the hard-to-do things when it comes to evaluations.

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. We don't have to worry about, "Where is that file that we received?" We can then keep track of all the vendors that we use and we can determine which vendor has a better shot for us if we want to get some information really quickly. 

An easy example that we use this platform for is that we want to hire a person to augment our staff. We have six or eight vendors who would do that kind of work for us. We're able to send the requirements for that staff position to all of those vendors. We're usually looking for a contractor, not to hire. We're able to ship that out really quickly to the vendors. They read the requirement and respond back with the resume of someone they have available who fits the requirements. We're able to quickly get that information from them. It doesn't get lost in emails because someone on the team is monitoring the system. We do get emails, but we're monitoring the system to get this information as quickly as possible. It's really meaningful and effective in getting that information out to the vendors.

The time it saves is when you have already created several RFPs or RFQs or RFIs and you can leverage those templates for the next time you have requests. So you don't have to recreate everything from scratch. You can say, "Create an RFI and use X as a template," where you're picking something that has a similar approach. That's where there are time savings.

You can also evaluate the dollar responses very easily and quickly, and compare them to those of the other vendors. One vendor says they'll charge $10, another one is $15, and a third one is $25. You can evaluate all the vendors in terms of their costs and see them on the screen together. So some of the evaluation functionality is great for time-savings. It doesn't save you any time in reading the RFP or reading the proposals and the information that the vendor sends back. With those, if you have to read them, you have to read them.

For my area, it's the contract module. It's for the lifecycle of contracting. I am in the legal department, and we have attorneys as well as senior legal specialists and legal specialists who work with this, strictly from the drafting and reviewing of the legal side of things. I'm the contract module administrator for the SMART program within our organization. 

This year we did add the sourcing procurement modules to it, which are being used more on the procurement side of our business supply chain. I do nothing with the supply chain sourcing side of it, such as the requests for proposals, the metrics that they're doing with spending analytics, etc.

From a contract perspective, in my opinion, SMART has improved things a hundred-fold. Change is hard for anybody, and we had a rough start with it. The first year that we were in it, it was a nightmare, to be honest. And GEP is very aware of that. But it definitely is a time-saver, once people learn how to correctly use it. It also reduces our risk at a lot of different levels. Eventually, people are going to trust it as a source of truth for contracting purposes.

Our compliance and accreditation agencies are able to see that we have our arms around this. 

One of the most important things is that the risk is reduced. A good example is that we have corporate compliance language in all of our documents. The reason we have that is because, as a healthcare organization, there are certain regulations we have to follow with Medicare exclusions or government payer exclusions. Those things get updated yearly, if not more. We know for a fact that there were people out there using corporate compliance language from three years ago. Even though I had updated it in certain templates, people didn't have access to them. Now, I will have that in the clause library in SMART. That alone is a huge risk reduction for this organization. It could literally cost millions of dollars if not done correctly, if something were to happen because we didn't have the right language in there. If something bad happened, we could have to pay back the U.S. government X amount of dollars. That's worst-case scenario, obviously, but it happens. Healthcare is vicious. By having those clauses available right in this tool for everyone, and everyone knowing that they are updated as needed, that risk is reduced to almost nil. You still have human error in there. Anytime you have a human touching it, you're going to have a potential risk, but it's certainly a lot less than it was a year ago.

There's a transparency here we didn't have before. For example, our system is pretty large. We have 11 or 13 hospitals now. With our previous tool, the regional hospitals, outside the main hospital, were not able to view certain agreements, but they were required to pay invoices under them or to abide by the terms and conditions of certain agreements that they couldn't even see. Now they can see them, because of the way that the users have access to this tool. They're able to go in and see the terms and conditions and see what their part is in that arrangement and see what they should be billed. That way, they know that they're paying the right amount and know that the deliverables are correct. We didn't have that in the past. They were getting copies of contracts that they thought were the right contracts, but they weren't certain. So that risk level has been reduced.

There are three main reasons that we started working with this product. The first one was to plan projects and report the savings. In this use case, we rely on GEP as a reporting tool for procurement.

The second reason we use it is for online sourcing. In this context, it gives us a platform to run online RFPs, RFIs, and online auctions.

The third reason is to use it for a contract repository.

In terms of how easy this product is to use, I would say something in the middle. It can be very complex, so it requires some training for the users. Especially for sourcing, it requires some detailed training.

It is possible to simplify things. We can create simple projects and simple sourcing events.

It's user-friendly, in terms of the design of the tool. 

GEP SMART is a unified platform that has definitely affected our procurement operations. It is part of our procurement strategy that we increase the usage of online sourcing. The fact that we use project sourcing and contracts means that these three modules support our source-to-contract process, which is one of the key processes of upstream procurement.

The tool helps us, firstly because it provides clear reporting. Second, we gain additional and incremental savings through only sourcing, especially through online auctions. Third, it helps us to be more efficient and transparent within the organization. For example, in procurement, GEP SMART helps facilitate information sharing between teams.

Using this product has significantly improved the efficiency of our procurement process. The more products or sourcing events, RFPs, and auctions that we have in the system, the more efficient it will be with the next project because it can start as a copy of a previous one. Doing so significantly reduces the preparation time of the RFPs and auctions.

GEP enables us to create different templates that we can store in the tool and use. This shortens the time required to prepare the tenders and then publish them to the suppliers. 

The platform also allows us to invite more suppliers because supplier management during the sourcing processes is faster and more efficient. We can manage multiple suppliers at the same time.

This product definitely saves us time when setting up an RFP. The first RFP needs to be created from scratch and requires some time but for any future RFPs, where we have things to repeat or do for a second time, it helps us to be faster and more efficient. The amount of time we save depends on the complexity of the RFP but it can be hours.

In summary, using this solution benefits our organization through cost savings, better efficiency, improved transparency, and having information archived.

With respect to the adoption of the platform in the company, for projects, it was pretty easy. It was also very well accepted because our key KPI is related to savings, which is done through the project reporting. This meant that people were highly motivated to use the reporting.

There is slower adoption for sourcing because it requires having quite good knowledge about how to use the product. Furthermore, the suppliers need to agree to participate in online sourcing events. It's not just about our company, but also about the suppliers, because they have to accept it.

It's going a little bit slower than we would like it but our company has a program running to help with this. We have been onboarding procurement teams in different affiliates around the world, and we teach them how to use the GEP solution for sourcing. This program has been live for approximately four years and we have onboarded between 25 and 30 procurement teams from around the world.

For contracts, the adoption is improving. Our aim is to have the top affiliates using all of the modules in three years.

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.