Gives us a single sourcing solution which helps to reduce redundancyI don't think their supplier management module is ready, from a full supply-relationship management perspective. The scope is very limited for supplier management. Also, in the contract module, the searching capability is sub-par. Most people are used to Google search and Amazon search. That's what's available on a day-to-day basis. GEP SMART's searching capability is extremely difficult to use. Their logic is different from Google and Amazon, so they return a lot of search results, which is something we're not really happy about. Another issue that I want to provide feedback on is that their icons are not as visible and as accessible as they should be. If we have someone with some form of disability, it's not easy for them to figure things out. When you hover an icon a little message pops up and tells you what it is, but the icons are so small and look very similar. It's a design element that looks great but it's a little hard to hover and makes for an accessibility issue. But overall, in general, it is intuitive to use. Also, I know that GEP, as a company, has been in business for close to 20 years, but they still operate as more of a startup and smaller company. They need to revamp their processes and put in controls in terms of quality assurance and quality control. In terms of their processes, there are no mechanisms for them to check up on how they refresh their data. So oftentimes, when we go into the tool and we don't see something, we alert them and they say, "Oh, the data hasn't been refreshed, so we'll go ahead and refresh it," and then what we're looking for pops up. We should not have to be the ones to tell them they need to refresh. There should be a mechanism in place for that. They're a technology company and their product is where we put our data. The refresh cycle should be automatic. As for quality control, I don't know if they do enough testing. When they release new enhancements, they do testing and it passes and that's why they push it to production. But it seems they only test that particular functionality and that they don't test how that functionality interacts with and impacts other functionalities. So that particular functionality itself is working, but oftentimes functionalities are interdependent and when we try to click on certain things which should behave in certain ways or bring us certain results, they don't work. We have to tell them, "Hey, it's not working. You need to fix this." Quite frankly, we're tired of informing GEP. They should be scrubbing from the left and right and from top to bottom to make sure that anything that they're releasing is fully tested. I get it, that one or two fall through the cracks. But it happens consistently that we're concerned with the data integrity because a refresh cycle didn't happen or there's a stability issue where something is working but when coupled with other functionalities it fails and we get an error message. Those are some of the things that the GEP is lacking. If they do want to compete in this market with other, bigger players, they need to up that game. GEP, as a company, is putting so much focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. That's great. We love it. And that's where the industry is moving. We like seeing those on their roadmap. However, foundationally, they need to fix some of their processes before they bring in the above-and-beyond bells and whistles. If their basic functionalities are not functioning the way that they're supposed to and they keep building on a broken foundation and adding more, eventually it will collapse. It will become too top-heavy. This has been a message that we've been sending to GEP over the course of the last two years. I understand that to keep up with the industry, they need to bring in some of the newer technologies, a newer perspective. That's a business decision. But they still need to go back to their core technology and really enhance that, so that when they add something it really couples with that core and enhances their technology overall. In addition, from our perspective, the way that they manage their technology is very fragmented. I mentioned that we use four different modules of GEP SMART but they were built in silos. Although they actually promote this or sell it as a fully-integrated solution, the way that we search in the sourcing module is different from the way we search in the contract module. Why are they different? It should be consistent. Another example is that the supplier ID in the supplier module is different from the supplier ID in the contract and sourcing modules, although it's the same supplier. Even though we enter and register our supplier in the supplier module, when they float through to the contract module and sourcing module, they generate a different supplier ID in the backend, so it's extremely difficult to trace back to see if it's the same supplier. If it's stemming from one module, it should be duplicated across all modules, as opposed to creating another copy of it. That confirms that they're building their technology in a very fragmented way. That needs to be addressed. We have a huge number of duplicate suppliers created. When someone facilitates a sourcing event, they enter suppliers' names differently. A classic example is IBM, which can be entered as "IBM Corporation", "IBM Corp" or just "IBM". Sometimes it's entered as "International Business Machines." GEP has been trying to work with us to leverage machine learning and AI to prevent people from creating duplicate suppliers. It hasn't been fully built-out. And there still needs to be some manual intervention. The human element needs to be there. Once it's fully built-out, it might help us. One of the things they proposed was that machine learning and AI would pop up a window that says, "Hey, we have all these similar company names." Based on what was entered — not just the supplier name but the contact information and addresses — it would say, "This company is about 80 percent matching to what you entered, so why don't you use this one instead of creating another one." There is stuff coming, but it's still not there. We're testing it out right now. We're hopeful that it will at least provide some guidelines for our folks, and at least cause them to pause a moment before they create another supplier.
