Zip provides a place for employees to initiate a purchase or vendor request. Each request is routed for approval across procurement, finance, IT, data security, legal, and other teams, and Zip integrates into ERP and P2P solutions to create a PR or draft PO. The vendor states Zip works with Canva, Checkr, Hopin, Zapier, CM Group, and other companies both public and private.
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.
Zip can be used for routing all vendor-level approvals for new vendors and all renewals across our organization. It can also be helpful for managing all purchases from existing vendors. For non-spend related approvals, it’s not as well suited. Zip was definitely designed for procurement workflows. They also have a vendor management portal that links up directly to something like NetSuite for management and visibility.
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.
There are some duplicated fields such as anticipated total spend vs. price line item breakdown that asks for the same thing. This is a little bit tedious
Does not show which invoices got processed and applied to open POs
Does not integrate / migrate special custom fields within Zip Intake-to-Procure into other tech stacks (NetSuite)
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
I prefer Zip for its for its user-friendly interface and ease of adoption, especially if the organization values a simpler and more intuitive system for users across various departments. Comparatively, Zip is a more budget-friendly solution compared to some enterprise-level systems like SAP ARIBA or Oracle PeopleSoft, especially for smaller or mid-sized organizations with specific procurement 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".
