Emptoris vs. Lightning Tools Lightning Forms

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

Overall, there are many use cases for which Lightning Forms provides a slick, easy to develop and extremely useful solution. Request forms that need to be actioned and inspection forms are the scenarios that we have used them for so far, which have seen a lot of success. We have decided that other scenarios that are perhaps more sensitive, for instance forms that may contain special category data relating to our customers, are less appropriate given the permissions/licensing constraints of both SharePoint and Lightning Forms.

• 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

• Simple user interface - users of the forms intuitively aware of how/where to input information. This is in part due to being able to show or hide different questions or areas of the form, and making them required or not, based on previous answers.
• Low/simple code - building complex forms with automation and multiple dependencies or lookups is relatively easy once you get started. You have the power of JavaScript to use and do some quite clever things if you can get to grips with it - a lot of solutions are only a Google away.
• As it is based on SharePoint, it integrates perfectly with the rest of the M365 suite. Things like PowerAutomate enhance its functionality even further.

• 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.

• The styling of the form can sometimes be slightly awkward to use depending on what you're looking to do. For instance, if I was looking to highlight fields that users have missed (left empty), I would need to set up a validation for that question and then set a style for that particular field for when it is invalid. When you have a large and complex form with lots of dependencies, this is awkward.
• Support for complex and niche issues is slightly lacking in my experience. I submitted a helpdesk ticket for help with a strange issue I couldn't figure out, which took several weeks to get a response to. Because it is niche, it's more difficult to find an answer by searching the internet. Luckily, knowing there is likely to always be a fix if you find the right place/use the right formula, I manage to resolve the issue with some trial and error.
• It is disappointing that Lightning Forms does not integrate with the MS Lists app. Having the ability to access the form through the list app would add in a lot of useful functionality, including a better experience for users when taking photos to add as attachments.

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

It is very user friendly both to me who is building the content (with little background knowledge of coding etc., other than what I have picked up from using products like PowerAutomate, PowerBI, a bit of html etc.) and to end users of varying levels of IT proficiency. This has been extremely important as we have used the forms to make relatively large process changes, and need to have our users on board and seeing that it is actually easier than it was before.

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

Some support has been okay, but in one instance of a fairly complex problem, the support team were not able to provide me with a fix within a few weeks, before I was able to find a workaround myself.

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

We were using Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists and PowerAutomate to attempt to do much of what we are currently doing. Functionality is very limited in comparison. The ability to make questions required based on previous answers was a massive improvement from normal SharePoint List forms and has greatly improved the quality of data. Also just the very visual display and customisation is much better.

• 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

• We changed the process by which site colleagues report repairs on behalf of customers. Instead of emailing them into a shared inbox, they now report them using a lightning form. We have seen a great improvement in the time taken for our team to log the repair issue from the time is arrives with them.
• We anticipate that streamlining our void property reletting process by using a SharePoint kanban board view with lightning forms (providing a single platform for all things void) will reduce avoidable days vacant and therefore reduce our void loss.