Likelihood to Recommend As a purchasing app, it is excellent. I cannot speak to its usefulness in the AP area. it may be less useful in a different environment, such as manufacturing. For research and healthcare use, it is excellent. Also, we use Banner as our ERP. SciQuest is well versed with integrating with Banner. Users with a different ERP may experience less pleasant results.
Read full review Sales Cloud is very well suited for the daily leads and opportunity pipeline management as well as user management. Sales process automation are very helpful for repetitive tasks. It integrates well with other platforms. It's easy to customize and report on data. Sales Cloud can be pricey so is only open to larger org's that need complex CRM. User adoption is slow to any new users that have no prior experience.
Read full review Pros Source to settle: Although we did not purchase all the new applications in the suite SciQuest made, what we did use, worked and worked nicely. With SciQuest you can get a turn-key system. I love the way SciQuest rolls out changes, measuring customer feedback, and rolling out major changes 3 times a year. Like clockwork you know what to expect ahead of time, deciding whether or not you need a particular enhancement (if optional), having plenty of time to make adjustments in business processes if needed, and/or user-base announcements. I was always astonished to see both clients and potential clients come to the conferences. SciQuest would allow the "mixing" of clients and potential clients, apparently unafraid of any negative commentaries the potential clients might get. That has always been impressive to me as a techie myself. Read full review Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity. Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc. API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity. Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant. Read full review Cons Their existing pricing model for the number of Suppliers onboarded or removed has been a little disappointing as there are times when suppliers do have to be switched out. They have greatly helped in making UNSPSC updating easier, but I would like to be able to get an extract with a delta that would make it easier for us to update our ERP as this information needs to be stored on both sides. Read full review I have hard-coded the auto-update of the phone number format and state format from some codes shared by the community, but I do not know where to do it. I cannot reset it either. It is unclear what functionalities each version has. We use the enterprise version, and it seems we can only have one design of the pipeline. But different business segments would have very different sales cycles, and hence, pipeline tracking would be different. It would be nice to have this available in our version. It seems I cannot create a report to pull notes logged at the account levels. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Simplified and user friendly system that has been implemented across our entire institute and with all of our vendors. We really like this program and it works well for us. Changing to another program would be a significant time investment and hassle
Read full review There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.
Read full review Usability There is a 3 month learning curve and then the features are easy to use. My AP team processes 400 invoices daily through the system. The things to watch for are vendor billing mistakes (no/incorrect PO number, information discrepancies) and buyer purchase request inconsistencies. Those are part of AP anyway so maybe it is what it is. The Sciquest AP software performs as designed some improvements needed. In our system I have documented a list of 60 improvements that could increase throughput up to 50%. Those improvements include making the AP records GUI format more customized for AP purposes, and improving the QC tolerance functionality, which can be laborious to sync (Match).
Read full review Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.
Read full review Reliability and Availability They have had only a couple of very quick occasions where they were down for 1-2 minutes. One time they had a problem adding attachments. Very Reliable!
Read full review Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.
Read full review Performance Having used SciQuest for over five years and having their competitors, SciQuest offers the best user experience and integration between vendors and ERP.
Joel Hood Finance Manager - KU Liberal Arts & Sciences Shared Service Center
Read full review Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day." Points per Salesforce - 1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs. 2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers. 3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. 4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed. 5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale. 6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com. 7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements. 8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training. 9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure
Read full review Support Rating They usually respond to medium-to-low priority issues very quickly, and high priority issues almost instantly. Their support team is knowledgeable and responsive. Their Supplier Enablement team is very good and is a feature that most of their competitors don't have. The company makes a serious effort to maintain good relationships with their customers.
Read full review The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.
Read full review In-Person Training I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person. I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business
Read full review Online Training Read full review I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training. We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this
Read full review Implementation Rating We had an internal project manager who was well versed in PMI methodologies. I think the implementation would have gone far less successfully, or may even have failed entirely, without her. She was able to do all the things a project manager is supposed to do, and in an ordered and organized manner.
Read full review Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Again, our SciQuest system integrates with Banner. Banner does have a way to create, approve and report on POs. However, the SciQuest product is so much more user friendly, so the learning curve is very steep. Also, SciQuest gives us a lot more detail in our reporting and PO history, which is helpful when trying to remember what happened 6 month ago
Read full review Salesforce Sales cloud is well integrated with a lot of other marketing and sales technology SAAS products that we use within our business, which is a big part of why I enjoy using it. Compared to NetSuite, it is a lot more user friendly, a modern platform that provides better visual understanding of sales pipeline and contains more useful data across the customer journey.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.
Read full review Scalability Highly reliable remotely hosted PTP solution that interfaces with our remote OCR vendor and with university sited operational servers. Twice a year over the last 3 years a SciQuest/OCR system file handling or network problem occurs that gets fixed within a day.
Read full review I don't think there is a limit to Sales Cloud's scalability; at least, I haven't encountered one or heard of one. My data is not enormous, so perhaps some companies might encounter lags, but nothing from my end. I think I'll be able to use Sales Cloud from now until infinity.
Read full review Professional Services Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.
Read full review Return on Investment Customers seem to be fine with selecting requisition items and having them pushed back via carts to a legacy system. Converting one's legacy ERP system to a SaaS solution may prove to be too much of an overhaul in regards to converting to a new set of rules which do not fit exactly with current business processes. The inability to enhance in great detail is also a drawback for customers coming from a highly modifiable system. Read full review All tools we've implemented with Salesforce had a pretty quick positive ROI with the exception of CPQ & Billing. That was a very large project that I would only suggest for businesses with many SKUs that tend to be packaged together. Read full review ScreenShots Salesforce Sales Cloud Screenshots