Emptoris vs. Sisense

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

I believe Sisense is perfectly suited for any organization of any size that have access to the proper resources, as the tool is very expensive. The data connectors come in all shapes and sizes out of the box, which allows a great deal of data control within the ElastiCubes. Additionally, while the platform only runs on Windows platforms, the web application can be accessed on any client: mobile, Apple, Windows, etc. This allows a much more flexible user experience, resulting in data and dashboards reaching further than any other tool.

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

• Customization - lots of supported and community plugins available. Users can also adjust the look and feel through JavaScript.
• Innovation - Sisense is continuing to push the envelope by developing new features through Sisense Labs.
• Customer support - the commitment to excellent customer service and ensuring organizations get the most out of their investment.

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.

• The usability of the application on mobile devices needs some improvement, especially navigation and filtering.
• Dashboards that are created by multiple users can be a bit of a hassle to share by Admins.
• If you need to embed dashboards into your website, you are require to buy a license separate from the user and platform license. This is a norm on most BI visualization tools, but Sisense can seem a bit on the high side, cost-wide.

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

I think the business and myself as a user has come to rely on SiSense as a dashboarding and quick ad-hoc reporting tool. I am hoping to integrate SiSense dashboards into more parts of the business in the future. We have reduced our report turn-around time for the most part from hours/days to minutes and in some cases almost the speed of thought. Reports are also easier on the eye and more easily distributed. I would also like to say that the support and professionalism from the SiSense team has been excellent.

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

Incentivized

New V5 is ground floor of an exciting collection of possibilities. Weekly Sisense developers come up with new functionality that they share with us in their forums. The move to HTML5 has been pleasing in that widgets auto size themselves into appropriate forms in the board but everyone of them can be popped out to full page size to be looked at in more detail

There are very few situations when there is unexpected downtime. Mostly during development, new dashboard implementation and during upgrades. other then that there were very few crashes.

SiSense is usually performing better then other solutions even if going for complex reports/dashboards(of course within reasonable frames). I haven't noticed any bad influence on other systems, usually if something happens it stays within SiSense.

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

SiSense's support ninjas are very knowledgeable and are exceptionally responsive. So far, all of the issues we ran into were resolved within minimum time. My sense of dealing with the support staff at SiSense is that they are very focused on not just answering your immediate question, but also to delve into the cause of the matter.

Easy and free training that allowed us quickly understand basics in SiSense and start using them. More advanced features requires some browsing through SiSense forums, but there is always support to help, and SiSense support is one of the best whith which I worked so far.

Many examples, videos and scenarios which you try on your own right away. This combined with in-person training gives you enough to utilize most of SiSense's power.

Remember to migrate the plugins. The documentation however is pretty straight forward.

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

1) Easy to use, really, there is nothing too much to say. The set up is easy and not confusing. You can use it internally or externally.

2) Customer Service, having spoken to various product reps from similar industry. Sisense rep provides you with the best support to get started, and it is really appreciated.

Product is quite easily scalable. The whole installation can be easily moved to stronger machine if needed.

• 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

• Report development time is reduced from 2~3 days to 2~3 hours.
• Report querying time is improved from 0.5~10 mins to 2~30 seconds.
• A 2-staff team delivers 10 times the BI output that we did on the old system.
• We were able to deliver BI and data analysis for all business functions instead of a very limited group of users