Emptoris vs. Lola.com

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

We are currently in the process of planning our company wide retreat in which we need at least 69 people to book their flights. While with that many people traveling at once, I do suspect I'll get some questions and have to assist some folks however by using Lola.com, the time I would have spent prior will be cut drastically. And I'll be able to see who is taking what flight and obtain departure and arrival information without much interruption to anyone's day. Prior to Lola.com this task would have been something truly daunting, but not this time!

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

• Provides corporate leadership with great insights into employee travel costs BEFORE they hit corporate credit cards, thereby facilitating better budgeting, planning, and cash flow management
• Offers employees who travel a single interface for booking travel
• Provides employees who are traveling with concierge level service when booking and while on the road
• The platform's live chat is fantastic!

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.

• Room for existing features to grow and expand, especially on the administrative side
• Visually-speaking, the overall layout and color scheme used within the site, specifically when it comes to placement and contrast of key text info, has led to some confusion at times
• Need for more support of existing travel rewards accounts

Incentivized

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

This is just my guess as I'm not involved in the decision aside from providing feedback on using Lola. I think, from what I've heard, that everyone likes Lola and we'll renew the usage. I say this because we're an all-remote company and this greatly solves the logistics of booking flights for everyone.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Lola is simple and straight to the point in regards to usability. I didn't have to figure things out and felt that the interface was intuitive. I loved it.

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

Lola's customer support is fantastic. They have frequently contacted us when there are travel alerts, or anticipated flight cancellations to re-book us before it was too late. They are always helpful and pleasant and we have never had any issues.

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

Lola.com is much easier to use in terms of UX. Very little Admin and/or user training is needed to get up and running with Lola.com -- which increases our ability to quickly scale the solution. However, I would say that Concur is able to do more inside the travel arena with the addition of expense tracking.

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

• They have made travel cheaper, so that is a direct reflection to our customers and to us.
• Customer Service just makes the stress of travel on our employees not so bad. Knowing we have someone to stand behind us while we travel goes a long way