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.
Filebound is great for documents that have been archived or not needed on a day to day basis. It serves it purpose as a storage/filing system to digitize any previous "hard copy" filing system. But for the day to day accessibility, I find other programs to be more responsive and quicker to use. Also, In order to use or edit any document uploaded to Filebound, you currently have to re-download the document onto your computer to edit. If the editing capabilities were streamlined for quicker response that would also be a plus.
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.
Filebound is easily to upload documents onto and file into the proper location. You can easily find a file on your computer and have it uploaded within seconds
Filebound gives you customization so you can create your own folders, criteria needed to file and search for uploaded documents. You have options of file types, names, certain fields of information to display when searching for files.
Filebound allows you to download and print your saved documents quickly for future access. There is no limit to how you can use your scanned documents
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.
Searching for Documents. Filebound does not allow you to look in differing file types for a specific document. You have to search each file type individually. And we have found that spaces or symbols are needed in front of the entered search information in order for Filebound to do a more broad search.
You cannot move uploaded around, if you have more than one scan in a file. Once they are uploaded into a location, you cannot move it, you can only delete it and re-scan it into the proper file.
If it was possible to simply drag and drop a file into Filebound to start the upload process, that would save 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.
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.
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
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".
I don't have numbers, but our organization was able to go from having three large off-site and one on-site storage units to having none. This saved money on a monthly and yearly basis.
