GEP SMART Reviews

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 are using it mainly for the RFQ, RFP, tendering, etc. 

We are also using it for contract management. Though, we haven't completely used all aspects of the contract management, e.g., we have used the supplier evaluation. We are uploading the contracts, then it is giving us reminders for renewals. For the contract administration part, we are getting notifications from the system. 

We have used it for a sealed bid and evaluation. It has functioned well.

We are using it for sourcing management. Since we have DOA approvals in the Oracle system, we cannot use the purchase requisition as well as a purchase order process in GEP SMART. When a request is coming from the user department, it will need approvals. Once it has the system approvals, it comes as a notification. Then, we will use GEP SMART as a standalone program to function from tendering until finalizing the tender. We then take that final result back to Oracle for the approval process. That is how it functions.

There is a bit of hesitation within the organization to completely adopt the system changes. Since there is involvement from various departments, e.g., legal and finance, there are challenges because we already use other systems. If the entire system would be GEP SMART from the beginning, then acceptance would be much better than implementing it in the middle.

The most valuable features are the sourcing and tendering processes.

I haven't had any difficulties when using it. 

Before introducing GEP SMART, we were using all the supplier databases in Oracle Financials. When we implemented GEP SMART, we wanted to do the supplier evaluation online on a real-time basis. We just wanted to give the link, but we faced some problems with the synchronization from GEP SMART to Oracle. Even though we have GEP SMART for the supplier registration, we use Oracle for our delegation of approval (DOA) processes. The DOA process is happening in Oracle Financials. Therefore, each time we register a supplier, it needs to have approval from finance and the business unit as well as the supply chain. Because we pushed the existing supplier database to the newly installed GEP SMART process, we have faced some problems with this function.

While it captures all the fields and requirements, when any supplier updates or new supplier registration happens, then the supplier needs to update their bank details. Our IT team has made it so every half an hour the GEP SMART system will push the supplier to the Oracle Database. So, we have faced some problems, like bank details, etc. We addressed this issue with GEP. They are working on it to make bank details a mandatory field for any supplier and match our requirements. Their engineering team has taken up creating a customized process for us.

We are planning to do the supplier performance evaluation this year, for which they have a module. Last week, we were having a discussion with GEP, and they had sent me a document, but I had to go through it in detail about how it would function in GEP SMART. 

We have been using the solution for more than a year. We went live in December 2020. From January 2021 onwards, we have been using it.

So far, we haven't seen any issues. 

We are not a heavy user of the solution. Due to the nature of our requirements, we use GEP SMART for minor projects because of the involvement from various departments. It would be difficult for us to explain and give training to everyone who needed to use the system with larger projects. Though, some high-value contracts are using GEP SMART. 

We have a total of 25 licenses, mostly assigned to the supply chain team, not the entire organization. These 25 users have full rights. However, there are users who have limited access. For example, a user from the technical department can do certain evaluations online. This does not need full rights. Instead, it has limited transaction details.

They have an excellent technical support team. We have a biweekly meeting with the technical team, where they capture all the issues in a log, then they come back to us with solutions. We can address any issues. If it is an engineering issue, then they will go back to their research and engineering team to fix it. 

Since we are in the oil and gas industry, we have specific, complex requirements due to our global presence. Therefore, it may take time for them to do the customizations since they need to make changes to the global platform. While those customizations may take some time, their response time is much better.

Positive

I have a good knowledge of sourcing software. I have implemented a lot of software and used four programs throughout the years. I have seen that the sourcing process in GEP SMART is easier than in Oracle, SAP, etc. 

The initial setup was quite straightforward. 

We had some challenges when we were migrating the existing suppliers to GEP SMART. We also had some issues when uploading the agreements to GEP SMART. For any organization, an agreement will be in different stages. Some of them will be at the half-life of the contract, some of them will be at the beginning, and some of them will be at the end. However, they gave us templates to upload documents, details, etc. Given the details in the template, it was easy to upload the documents and information to GEP SMART.

The deployment took a month. We had the templates, which we used for the details. Globally, there were about 120 contracts and 4,000 suppliers that we deployed initially. So, the deployment didn't take a lot of time. 

In Malaysia, we haven't yet used GEP SMART. Though, they are planning to use it this year. Because of restrictions, we needed approval from the local authority. Even though we implemented all three modules, i.e., vendor management, contract management, and sourcing management, only Abu Dhabi used all three together. Whereas, Thailand and Malaysia were using it in different stages. In Thailand, they initially used the contract management module to upload all their contracts and administer them. Later on, they started to use the sourcing management and vendor management modules.

If our organization could use it as a full-fledged solution, then it would be valuable and give a return on investment. However, since we are not currently using it as a full-fledged solution, even facing some bugs and problems with the synchronization with some of the internal software, we are not able to use it in a full-fledged manner.

We have two types of licenses: 

1. The full license.
2. A license for people who can work in the system but aren't heavy users. 

We evaluated five different software solutions. We looked at Oracle, Aruba, and some solutions developed in our local market.

It is a good solution.

We don't know how possible it is to use the full function of GEP SMART. What we understood from the GEP team is that they have an entire end-to-end process, such as a procure-to-pay process available in GEP SMART. We haven't taken any chances up to now, since we are using this solution for our global platform. For example, we have operations in Southeast Asia, like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, and there are certain restrictions in the system due to required customizations. A lot of customizations are required due to regulatory requirements from Southeast Asia. Therefore, it is not easy for us to completely use the platform. We may use it completely in another two or three years.

We are unable to use their contracting process very well because we need to use contract templates. Unfortunately, our legal team has their own standardized software to use for agreements. They were not ready to accept GEP SMART to work online for reviewing the contracts. So, we tender out to suppliers, and when the supplier comes back to us with any comments on the agreement format, then we will download it and share that with legal, using Outlook to work on it. We haven't used the full-fledged, end-to-end solution because we cannot use it with our legal team.

Rather than going with one or two modules and synchronizing them with a lot of other systems internally, which would be a tough task, you should get the full procure-to-pay solution. Overall, the full-fledged solution can be very good for your organization.

From my experience, I would rate the solution as seven out of 10.

Public Cloud

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.