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.
Nvoicepay is super helpful for organizations that want to run lean and have a lot of accounts payable going out each day/week/month. The cost of having Nvoicepay vs having an employee process payments for each of our vendors is a massive cost savings. I believe it would be less appropriate for organizations that are only sending a few payments each month or have a lot of recurring payments instead of unique bills each month. Recurring payments are easily booked and memorized in most accounting systems and setting up autopay takes care of having to actually make the transaction manually.
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.
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.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of Nvoicepay is the reporting. Simply working through the filtering to find a transaction in the history is extremely difficult. If you don't select the filters in the correct order you will typically find zero results.
The formatting for the upload is also a little tricky. Since you are uploading an excel file, any zip codes with leading zeros typically have the zeros removed and result in a failed upload. So having to place an apostrophe in front of any leading zeros is kind of pain especially when you have 100 plus lines of transactions.
The main dashboard is also something to be desired. I understand the concept of providing the dashboard, but what use is it if I can't dig in and see what the numbers and graphs are made of? If Nvoicepay was able to hyperlink to the transactions that make up each category it would make the dashboard far more useful.
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 used Zevez in the past to make credit card payments but NVoicepay is a much more robust system which also allows for ACH and check payments. Also, they were able to contact vendors for us and sign them up with their preferred payment methods. Easy to implement and easy to use.
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".
Nvoicepay has had only a positive impact on our overall business objectives. Since it takes care of remedial tasks of processing payments we are able to concentrate on more complex tasks such as prepping for close, creating schedules, and improving other processes.
