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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Zip Intake-to-Procure
Score 7.8 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
