GEP SMART is a procurement platform, meant as an end-to-end unified procurement solution that provides synergy between finance and purchasing and process fluidity.
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Negotiatus
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Negotiatus is purchasing software from the company of the same name in New York, that aims to transform the way business administrators and users place orders, control spend, and submit payment across their vendors. The platform is built for the entire purchasing process, and is designed to provide a consistent experience from sourcing through payment across every vendor and website.
They are starting to expand in the direct procurement area and it would be good to see continued offerings in this area. The GEP supplier portal is a great way for suppliers to maintain visibility and increase efficiencies without an additional charge to the supplier. It has a high ease of use.
Negotiatus is well suited for multi-location--many locations doing the same thing, such as a franchise model. However, if you really want to have tight control on costing, the reporting is not robust enough that, with scale, it would make more sense to bring this in house and create your own vendor relationships
The account team is there to listen client concerns and business needs.
The engineering team is willing to share their concepts in development and vet with their clients prior to production release. They value client feedback.
GEP has a lot of progressive thinkers and is willing to invest in new technology trends such as AI, Machine Learning, digital adoption, etc.
Consolidated invoicing--Negotiatus consolidates all invoices into one monthly invoice for us to pay by the 15th of the subsequent month.
General ledger mapping--products on the platform can be mapped to one or more entities or cost centers through a monthly consolidated file, which has great value when it comes to process efficiency.
Ease of use--the platform is fairly easy for both users and administrators. With many locations that are geographically dispersed, it allows us to manage purchasing without an excess training need.
Our organization has yet to take advantage of upgrading to the latest version of GEP SMART. The version that we are on does not make use of the full screen for the different internal windows and pop-up windows. I find it cumbersome to scroll left-right and up-down on the smaller windows when there is much real-estate on the screen that could optimize the user interface.
GEP SMART provides technical support but our vendors seem to have some difficulty logging in to their profiles and updating their information. Occasionally, the salesperson delegates to another internal member so we'll have to set up the new member with their log in.
The digital signature process requires that the signers of the agreement be defined before the agreement is routed for approval. Sometimes our vendors have a pool of signers that could sign the agreements and it can become a small challenge to change the signers after it has already been defined in GEP SMART.
Communicating Savings: Negotiatus sells itself on its vendor network--the ability to search for the best possible price according to what is available. However, it is challenging to tell what that savings would have been (e.g., WB Mason vs. Amazon).
Speed of Resolution: it sometimes takes a few months to come to a resolution when it comes to analysis/reporting. As they do not have great reporting around savings, we often ask for them to provide some periodic analysis. The account manager will put in the request, but it may not get completed or be up to the appropriate standard due to lack of understanding of the requirements.
Cancelled Orders: at some points early on (2+ years ago), many of the orders were cancelled and we were left scrambling to replace them. That has gotten much better.
The tool is fantastic, but we are investigating a broader spend management solution at the moment which may mean we look in a different direction for this capability, most likely internally developed.
The platform's usability compares favorably with those that it competes within the market. Our employees have not endured a stressful change management process because the tool is relatively intuitive. The advantage of being cloud-native and built with usability in mind from the get-go gives GEP a real advantage over many of its competitors.
I experience many issues in the UAT environment when the page is slow to load or will not load at all. I use the UAT environment to run training sessions to take potential users through all the functionality available. When the system is slow to load and keeps crashing it gives potential users a very bad first impression and significantly reduces the adoption rate.
The support team is responsive, smart, and knowledgeable about their product and about our business needs. They are also flexible to respond to questions and find solutions to our requirements.
Although we had encountered many bugs, GEP was able to address them quickly, and sent a technical person to sit in our hands-on training sessions to address bugs efficiently
We selected GEP SMART for its ability to offer a full end-to-end integrated source-to-pay solution, pricing, and ease of use. There was an implementation series offered by GEP, as well as flexibility, customization, account management team dedication, and the overall service and support.
GEP SMART has improved our spend analytics speed by allowing analysis to be completed in minutes compared to days when we previously used Excel spreadsheets.
The SMART Sourcing (RFX) solution has greatly improved the consistency of our supplier quoting and information gathering process.
