CobbleStone Contract Insight® vs. Emptoris

We use Cobblestone for all of our contract types across the company. We had a phased roll-out which helped get us live fast and share experiences with other departments for their implementation. the fact that it can support the different department and contract type scenarios were the biggest selling point. We are confident that it will evolve with us as we grow and acquire.

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

• The Cobblestone reps are great to work with.
• Cobblestone is easy to use and setup. Our users caught on quick.
• CobbleStone has a nice user-interface.
• CobbleStone's mobile app is a plus.
• Cobblestone integrates with a lot of other systems we use.

• 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

• They are great to work with.

• 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.

Cobblestone has been great for us. I expect that we will work with them for many years.

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

We were please to see the fast user adoption with Cobblestone. We used their training services and were pleased with the delivery. The system also includes helpful videos and step-by-step guide. Cobblestone has out of the box dashboards that we used and tweaked to meet role-specific needs. The user interface is easy to understand.

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

Incentivized

Cobblestone's support is responsive and reliable. We use their self-help content and their standard support.

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

CobbleStone is the easiest contract management system to use. The setup took less time than expected and was under budget. The system flexibility was another selling point for us. The other systems seemed OK for one type of contract but didn't seem to support the variety of contracts that we have. It has been great for third-party contracts as well as authoring our contracts from templates and clause libraries.

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

• Easier contract request process
• Faster legal reviews
• Simpler workflow and approval processes
• Improved contract compliance
• Easier contract authoring and negotiations
• Faster contract signatures
• More secure contract repository with user permissions
• Better contract analytics

• 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