Coupa’s cloud-native Business Spend Management
(BSM) platform provides end-to-end processes
that helps drive collaboration
across for every business leader from supply chain, procurement,
finance, treasury, compliance, and IT and supply chain
leaders to help their companies to get the visibility and control they need to
spend smarter, mitigate risk, and improve
resilience. A
unified platform approach frees up IT from complex integrations to help
leaders deliver on these goals.
$549
per year
GEP SMART
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
GEP SMART is a procurement platform, meant as an end-to-end unified procurement solution that provides synergy between finance and purchasing and process fluidity.
At the time of selection, about 4 years ago, GEP offered the best balance of usability, functionality, cost, and partnering for our needs. Since then we have re-evaluated the market and there are now other vendors that offer a better mix, together with a superior innovation …
Coupa and GEP SMART are both procurement software. They are most commonly used by large businesses and enterprises. Coupa is sometimes adopted by smaller organizations as well.
Beyond general procurement processes, Coupa has some additional capabilities like inventory management, and it also is heavily used for its invoicing management features. GEP SMART focuses on its spend visibility features, unifying spend processes and expense management across disparate financial systems within the enterprise.
Features
Both Coupa and GEP SMART have various specializations that help them stand out among users.
Coupa excels in its invoice management capabilities. The platform’s flexibility around invoicing capabilities makes it a viable option beyond traditional procurement industries like manufacturing. It also has excellent integrations with other financial systems organizations use, such as Enterprise Resource Planning platforms.
GEP SMART stands out for its visibility into enterprises’ global spend, allowing for a unified view of expenses within the procurement process. Additionally, reviewers highlight the vendor’s excellent customer support throughout GEP SMART’s implementation and product lifecycle. GEP SMART also has robust customization abilities, particularly around workflows and reporting.
Limitations
There are also drawbacks to Coupa and GEP SMART alike that buyers should keep in mind.
Coupa’s excellence around invoicing trades off with lackluster expense support. Expense management processes have been bottlenecks and points of frustration for some users, particularly managing and reporting on expenses as an administrator. Related to these frustrations, Coupa’s mobile application is also far weaker and less efficient than the desktop application, limiting on-the-go expense reporting. The interface is also not user friendly for administrators and end-users alike.
On the other hand, GEP SMART can require more manual actions than users might be used to. There is limited automation in certain areas, especially when sending data between various procurement processes. There are also some limitations in e-invoicing in certain geographic areas.
Pricing
Coupa does not specify pricing publicly. Pricing is instead quoted on a customer-by-customer basis.
GEP SMART pricing is also offered by quote from the vendor.
Suitable: Simple indirect procurement. Low cost; short cycle implementation. Less Suitable: Complex procurement scenario requiring serious vendor collaboration. End-to-end integration. Direct Material Procurement, especially when planning, quality inspection, and other miscellaneous activities are involved, requires handling various special statuses and updates to meet industry- or country-specific requirements.
They are starting to expand in the direct procurement area and it would be good to see continued offerings in this area. The GEP supplier portal is a great way for suppliers to maintain visibility and increase efficiencies without an additional charge to the supplier. It has a high ease of use.
Coupa is easy to use, however, we had to teach our end users about procurement. They are not used to conducting an RFP, onboarding a supplier, or preparing a PO. This is the change management that our employees had to be prepared to understand. The Shelby Group helped us with the implementation.
The hardest part was the integration between NetSuite and Coupa. We wanted to have a dynamic tight integration between the two solutions. If we adjusted the chart of accounts or added a new supplier we wanted it to be able to done in both systems and be available immediately in both systems. We used a partner called SuiteSkies to accomplish this dynamic integration.
We’ve been able to manage the implementation and maintenance with a very lean IT group.
The account team is there to listen client concerns and business needs.
The engineering team is willing to share their concepts in development and vet with their clients prior to production release. They value client feedback.
GEP has a lot of progressive thinkers and is willing to invest in new technology trends such as AI, Machine Learning, digital adoption, etc.
Support Team - A little slow in responding. I think the tool is so configurable that they struggle with figuring out what is causing certain issues that are being submitted on the portal.
I'd love for the Sourcing Module to be able to support larger events. There seems to be a limit on the number of lines each event can support and as a growing retailer, our store count dictates we have room to grow and that each store is represented in the bid process.
Would like to see the ability to issue multiple POs for a single item to multiple locations. The tool may do this but I know I can't and it may be due to how we interface with our ERP.
Our organization has yet to take advantage of upgrading to the latest version of GEP SMART. The version that we are on does not make use of the full screen for the different internal windows and pop-up windows. I find it cumbersome to scroll left-right and up-down on the smaller windows when there is much real-estate on the screen that could optimize the user interface.
GEP SMART provides technical support but our vendors seem to have some difficulty logging in to their profiles and updating their information. Occasionally, the salesperson delegates to another internal member so we'll have to set up the new member with their log in.
The digital signature process requires that the signers of the agreement be defined before the agreement is routed for approval. Sometimes our vendors have a pool of signers that could sign the agreements and it can become a small challenge to change the signers after it has already been defined in GEP SMART.
The tool is fantastic, but we are investigating a broader spend management solution at the moment which may mean we look in a different direction for this capability, most likely internally developed.
-Could be easy or hard to use depending on corporate policies and compliance. At times, errors and cryptical message associated with them could drive users mad.
The platform's usability compares favorably with those that it competes within the market. Our employees have not endured a stressful change management process because the tool is relatively intuitive. The advantage of being cloud-native and built with usability in mind from the get-go gives GEP a real advantage over many of its competitors.
I experience many issues in the UAT environment when the page is slow to load or will not load at all. I use the UAT environment to run training sessions to take potential users through all the functionality available. When the system is slow to load and keeps crashing it gives potential users a very bad first impression and significantly reduces the adoption rate.
-Support is generally speaking OK (not great). The user community is quite active, and the response time is acceptable. I would certainly hope there's more user-generated content (like in SAP, Oracle, and Linux, etc.), but I suppose Coupa is still not large enough, and the incentives are not yet there.
The support team is responsive, smart, and knowledgeable about their product and about our business needs. They are also flexible to respond to questions and find solutions to our requirements.
Although we had encountered many bugs, GEP was able to address them quickly, and sent a technical person to sit in our hands-on training sessions to address bugs efficiently
Concur was a lot easier and more user friendly for employees doing expense reports on their phone. That is not the case with Coupa. You must use your laptop to do expenses and our managers don't always have enough time to do that while out in the field working. This has caused some issues.
We selected GEP SMART for its ability to offer a full end-to-end integrated source-to-pay solution, pricing, and ease of use. There was an implementation series offered by GEP, as well as flexibility, customization, account management team dedication, and the overall service and support.
GEP SMART has improved our spend analytics speed by allowing analysis to be completed in minutes compared to days when we previously used Excel spreadsheets.
The SMART Sourcing (RFX) solution has greatly improved the consistency of our supplier quoting and information gathering process.
