Emburse Chrome River vs. Emptoris vs. Negotiatus

The Emburse Chrome River is well suited for tracking expenses and reimbursement. The compliance part of the software makes the task very easy to ensure all the reports that are being used within the company are updated and easy to verify. The Automating invoice processing makes some redundant task easy to execute.

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

Negotiatus is well suited for multi-location--many locations doing the same thing, such as a franchise model. However, if you really want to have tight control on costing, the reporting is not robust enough that, with scale, it would make more sense to bring this in house and create your own vendor relationships

Incentivized

• [Emburse] Chrome River listens to its customer's needs and does its best to match current products to those needs, or collaborate internally to determine if an enhancement can be made available that will not only benefit that customer, but will be a good use case for all Chrome River customers.
• The [Emburse] Chrome River customer service team is great. Unlike most companies, you can speak to a liver person!
• [Emburse] Chrome River's training offerings are relevant and pertinent to the day to day operations of the software.

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

• Consolidated invoicing--Negotiatus consolidates all invoices into one monthly invoice for us to pay by the 15th of the subsequent month.
• General ledger mapping--products on the platform can be mapped to one or more entities or cost centers through a monthly consolidated file, which has great value when it comes to process efficiency.
• Ease of use--the platform is fairly easy for both users and administrators. With many locations that are geographically dispersed, it allows us to manage purchasing without an excess training need.

Incentivized

• Would be great to have pre-saved templates available to apply to line items at the expense report header level rather than having to go into each line.
• Would be nice to have a mass upload functionality for things like cost codes, allocations, and credit card users.

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.

• Communicating Savings: Negotiatus sells itself on its vendor network--the ability to search for the best possible price according to what is available. However, it is challenging to tell what that savings would have been (e.g., WB Mason vs. Amazon).
• Speed of Resolution: it sometimes takes a few months to come to a resolution when it comes to analysis/reporting. As they do not have great reporting around savings, we often ask for them to provide some periodic analysis. The account manager will put in the request, but it may not get completed or be up to the appropriate standard due to lack of understanding of the requirements.
• Cancelled Orders: at some points early on (2+ years ago), many of the orders were cancelled and we were left scrambling to replace them. That has gotten much better.

Incentivized

Chrome River is easy to use. We needed little training for our users and instead pointed them to Chrome River's Help Guides which are clearly written and easy to understand. With tools SNAP and the ability to email receipts means we can be completely remote when submitting reports.

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

I would rate Chrome River Expense a 10 because, as I mentioned before, it is very simple and easy to use. This is important from an administrative point-of-view as well as for the field employee. Being a general contractor, it makes it all the better for our employees to use a program that is easy to understand and requires little time and effort. It has made tracking expenses very simple and has been well received by the entire company.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The software is always running effectively. I use many Cloud based systems and never had issues with Chrome River

Incentivized

System runs normal pretty much all the time. Does not slow any other systems down.

Incentivized

This has been easy for me because we have a rep that contacts the supporters for this product to correct any issues we may have with the software or changes needed to help out employees use Chrome River easier. This from my understanding has been a hit or miss kind of interaction with our rep and Chrome River.

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

The software is very user friendly, so the online training was easy to pickup for everyone.

Incentivized

Before implementation begins, make sure you have a plan on how you would like your workflow and platform setup for a system like Chrome River. It will speed the process and eliminate the need to make changes when you go live.

Incentivized

It's the [industry-leading] software for Enterprise level organizations with [large-scale] teams and financial responsibilities. The software has the most robust set of tools and pays for itself with the amount of time it saves. Many newer alternatives have sprouted up but I don't know that we would ever trust another software to do our Expense Tracking and Management.

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

It's very easy software to design to your needs.

Incentivized

• We have seen a return on approver time of nearly 60% meaning our approvers have tripled their output.
• We have had feedback from our users that time spent creating expenses has gone from an average of 2 hours to perhaps 20 minutes, tops.
• We have seen in our dashboards that the Emburse Certify Suite of tools has returned an average savings of over $500K a year.

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

• Positive efficiencies (major positive)
• Negative monthly costs per location
• Positive control

Incentivized