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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JAGGAER
Score 6.8 out of 10
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JAGGAER is a procure-to-pay provider in the higher education and government sectors. JAGGAER eProcurement and strategic sourcing customers gain access to suppliers on a scalable, customizable platform. The JAGGAER SaaS-based, source-to-settle solution provides unparalleled visibility, insights and recommendations to procurement leaders and suppliers. The result is a fluid supply chain driven by spend analysis, contract management, and an accounts payable solutions.
Associate Director, Sourcing and ContractsTechnology
Chose GEP SMART
We have competitively bid to select GEP and based on the evaluation criteria and pricing proposed, we felt that GEP had the most potential and willingness to work with us. In terms of functionality, I personally think Ariba and Jaggaer have more mature products, but many of …
At the time of selection, about 4 years ago, GEP offered the best balance of usability, functionality, cost, and partnering for our needs. Since then we have re-evaluated the market and there are now other vendors that offer a better mix, together with a superior innovation …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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!
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.
Having used SciQuest for over five years and having their competitors, SciQuest offers the best user experience and integration between vendors and ERP.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
