BQE CORE is a business management solution built specifically for professional service firms. BQE CORE is a combination of a billing assistant, project management, and accounting solution. CORE is designed to do the hard work of delivering actionable insights directly to the user's dashboards or inbox. BQE CORE replaces the products Engineeroffice, Archioffice, and BillQuick; the functionality of these applications is now found in BQE CORE.
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SAP Ariba Procurement
Score 7.9 out of 10
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SAP Ariba's Procurement capabilities are to provide innovations in guided buying and spot buy, plus supplier and catalog enablement, and integration with Ariba Network – which the vendor states is more than 4.6 million connected companies strong and growing.
BQE CORE is well suited for someone that wants to overpay to keep track of time, invoicing, and standard financial metrics. BQE CORE has the opportunity to be a really robust operating system for an architectural practice that wants to understand how projects are going, how they can improve as a studio, and move forward in providing great impact to their clients, all the while, spending less time in a boring software that no architect wants to use. BQE CORE can feel like a necessary thing for a studio to be managing growth well. But it also can be a lot of fun, intuitive, and exciting for an architect that just wants to be an architect. It can be a learning tool. However, it's too clunky, it isn't flexible, only reactive, and backwards looking for KPIs. To integrate with interesting equations of how a firm can look at project success, turn it into a dashboard for the entire studio, that would be fun. The banking cloud feed is one of the worst I have experienced. The lack of reporting customization is awful. And the amount of redundant information that has to be put into a project that you actually want to have phases in, track your allocations, and manage it, is entirely too cumbersome. BQE Core has an AWESOME foundation. But to build the proverbial house, we gotta care about the craft.
SAP Ariba is well suited for complicated procurement processes requiring lot of inter department interfacinng and comments and reviews at every stage. It is possible to maintain complete history of the procurement cycle and records inputs from all stakeholders- internal and external. It automatically creates a to do function on the system of the person at whose desk any issue remains unresolved.
Invoice Collections within Billing is a great tool because of the ability to take notes and track contact.
Invoices are professional looking and easy for our clients to understand the overall progress within each phase of their project.
Dashboards are the best tool EVER!
The Contact List feature within Clients setup is the perfect way to track multiple project managers within a large company that also has multiple contracts with us.
Startup training is available (& you need it so that you get off to a great start)
A report that shows the key setups for a project that can be glanced over quickly to assure it is correct
A way to set a new start date for the dashboards and data set, or a way to default old bad data to a default so reports run without bad data showing up.
Integration with other tools is not very good. The APIs provided are not scheduled within the Ariba process and must use a middleware to send information back and forth between tools
Customer support for configuration questions. The response time can be weeks or months waiting time and the response back is often unhelpful.
Flexibility with company entities. With a large company with so many entities it is hard to structure and customize your suppliers into many entities. You often have to duplicate.
We have been using Core for a few years now, and honestly started to look at other software systems to see what was out there. What we chose was a nightmare for migration so we never left Core. Now we have added invoicing and payments from Core instead of double entry with QBO. Still only a few cycles in but looks like it will be up to speed soon and working smoothly.
Navigating CORE is a breeze as the tool is visually organized well. Improvements need to be made to filtering. A more intuitive approach would help with generating reports and utilizing the resource allocation and forecasting tabs. Filtering by resource groups on these tabs are broken which is a huge inconvenience. Overall, though, the tool is easy to use as a whole, and the support team is very responsive and always available to help when you have a question.
As an end user I tend to prefer modern interfaces. It may be good for the backend users in accounting, but for me it is obvious that all the email notifications and built in interface is lacking on the overall state of UI/UX in the industry. It is not the worst of course if compared to those of the biggest competitors though (company starting with "O").
This is one area that does need some improvement. It can be slow at time, so we had our IT look at it from our side and we had no issues, so it has to be some slowness on their side.
I have never needed to contact support for this product. Although it is suggested I skip this question if I have no applicable experience with it, I don't have the option to skip it. So I will instead attempt to get 50 words in this box as explanation for that.
SAP Ariba support comes with multiple options. The standard support model for all customers is the shared service model where the SLAs are acceptable.
For customers with critical needs, a paid upgrade is offered in the form of 'Preferred support'. This paid service promises better SLAs and Best Practice literature and services from Ariba.
The Bad -
Some service issues get caught in between SAP Ariba support and SAP support. This triage may result in a loss of time for customers.
I am a user and was not involved in the decision making. Tool was already in place when I joined. But comparing to other tools I have used in the past, BQE is by far the easiest to use. You do not need any training to start using this tool immediately
I have and still use Coupa. Coupa is much less robust in comparison to Ariba. SAP Ariba Procurement has the ability to see what transactions have been sent, the ability to resend cXML Purchase Orders, see a history of what has happened with transactions, much more robust reporting capabilities, etc. SAP Ariba Procurement is 5-10 times better than Coupa in my opinion.
BQE Core has allowed our growing business to manage time tracking in an effective and efficient manner. We could not have effectively kept running our operation without it.
BQE Core provides all of the reports we need to do our monthly management reporting. This allows us to quickly spot problems such as capacity overloads, receivables problems, budget overruns, or timekeeping issues.
BQE Core has supported our business objective of generating more profit from projects that we undertake by allowing us to quickly and effectively monitor budget burn rates before it becomes an issue.
Improving Broadspectrum's PIFOT for suppliers who have migrated to invoicing through Ariba.
Provided a simple end-user interface to support PO creation, which has improved internal business process. This has led to good quality PO's being created upfront, which has reduced unnecessary re-work to ensure invoices are paid on time, and improved the businesses capability to report on real time commitment.
