Certa vs. Emptoris

Our brief experience with Certa was great overall. We liked the many options it provided, and saw how easily it could help manage our company's needs. However, the app was not as intuitive to work our way through, especially for those in our company that are not tech savvy. The onboarding function was what I was most excited about while using it. The dashboard made it super easy to see the overview of a project and know the next steps that need to be taken, and help get everyone on the same page without having to send emails, calls or texts to give updates. However, when deciding whether to continue with Certa or go a different route, the choice was hard, but he had enough employees struggling and unsure on the app that made the end decision

Incentivized

If you have a highly bureaucratic organization that is heavily focused on procurement, Emptoris can provide some value. It seemed to be very good at linking the contract information to procurement for better spend control. If you are trying to implement a standalone contract management solution that allows you to easily create contracts and store them in a central location, this isn't the tool for you. There doesn't appear to be a simplified implementation. In general, when a SaaS solution has a complicated and expensive implementation, I am very skeptical. This does not show that the vendor is trying to move customers forward on a single code base. If that many things need to be done during implementation, you are starting to customize the solution for every customer. This hurts the vendor's ability to scale and make improvements in the future.

Incentivized

• It made it easy to onboard suppliers
• Internal and external team communication
• Fully customizable

Incentivized

• Document protection - the Check Out contract feature is a great way to allow external parties to make modifications to contract language without the ability to accept those changes. Those redlines can then be imported back into Emptoris and reviewed or further modified as needed.
• Notifications & reminders - you can trigger an email manually from within the system, or you can configure automated notifications andreminders to alert users when a new task is received or has aged a given amount of days, etc.
• Interview wizard - there is a lot of value in the interview wizard. Administrators can configure screens with selecting options via check boxes, radio buttons, or typed-in values. Variables and conditions can be used to selectively populate fields within the contract or apply other options, making for a quick and convenient method to generate contracts conforming to corporate standards.
• Field customization - administrators can customize a list of options for various fields including contract substatus, address type, and user created business term variables.
• Approvals - many different options are available to configure approvals to trigger automatically upon presenting and/or executing the contract including specific individuals, one or more approver groups, or based upon various criteria including terms within the contract, type of contract, or the contract's owning organization.

Incentivized

• Because it is fully customizable, we felt like there were too many options. Having more of a basic template for like-minded industries would be helpful.
• Maneuvering around the app was not as easy as I'd hoped. We have several employees that aren't tech savvy, and it was hard getting them to use the app.

Incentivized

• Reporting, Emptoris comes with standard reports which can not always can be fit into our business. This needs to be improved. I hope Emptoris is addressing this issue in their latest releases.
• Though the feature of editing language in MS word is excellent, loading MS word takes time.

There are a lot of new, exciting products coming out in every field and I believe that there is always something better right over the horizon. If it was my choice, I would review my usage of Emptoris and other software periodically to make sure I'm using the most efficient software possible.

Incentivized

Emptoris is a pretty robust tool overall. Learning curve is small and it is simple to use

Incentivized

The above rating for the overall support from Emptoris is for their product / product support, roll out training and refresher training / ongoing training, which is not only good but superior. There is no major or reconizable bad review that can be given to Emptoris at this point in time, from where is stands.

Incentivized

We actually ended up picking JobNimbus over Certa only because we had employees that were already familier with JN and felt comfortable navigating and assisting other coworkers. It came down to JN and Certa and that was the only reason we didn't go with Certa. They were very comparable, but the few employees that are not tech savvy were having difficulties navigating Certa. I would not be opposed to using Certa in the future or recommending it to other companies.

Incentivized

I am a fan of Ariba to be used for the entire lifecycle of Sourcing. From RFX's to cutting PO's. I feel Emptoris misses the boat on the idea of a "One Stop Shop" for all of your Sourcing/Purchasing needs

Incentivized

• The contract software was great. We were spending money each month to have certified contracts signed and drawn up. Certa did a great job at including this feature, saving money overall.
• Once all documents and contacts are inputted, so much time and effort would be saved. We would no longer need to call, email or follow up with each other to verify that tasks were completed.

Incentivized

• We won the 2005 Baseline Magazine Award for best ROI related to a technology implementation with an ROI 5544% (see 2005 Baseline ROI Awards, GlaxoSmithkline).
• We always felt we could do "two times the work, with half the people and deliver double the savings".

Incentivized