TrustRadius Insights for GEP SMART are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Intuitive User Interface and Visual Tools: Customers have commended the software for its user-friendly interface and robust visualization features that facilitate effortless data exploration and detailed reporting capabilities.
Exceptional Support and Training Services: Users appreciate the top-notch support and training offered by the GEP team, highlighting their dedication to tailoring solutions, nurturing client relationships, and consistently enhancing their services.
Effective Spend Module for Savings Objectives: Some users have found the spend module highly beneficial in achieving sourcing team savings targets, providing enhanced visibility for strategic planning and budget control. The recent supplier portal integration has also streamlined processes for suppliers with real-time updates.
Utilizing GEP SMART to analyze supplier spend data. I'm currently in the process of expanding capabilities to allow suppliers to review and upload their own information.
Pros
Analyze data
Great UI
Visualize data via dashboarding
Cons
General navigation - often enough, it is challenging to navigate and find what is needed
Loading speeds are also a little slower compared to other software
Likelihood to Recommend
For new users, it can be challenging to navigate and understand the functionality of the tool.
As users/manager of the users, we use it for procurement decisions and mainly to have approval workflows in place in the organization.It streamlines the business process approvals for the indirect purchases, and creates governance across the purchasing decisions
Pros
PO, INVOICES Approval workflows
Integration with SAP
Approval emails to the business users
Turnaround to convert a PO to invoice
GEP support
Cons
Trunaround time of custom enhancement
Artificial intelligence for different use cases
Likelihood to Recommend
Workflow approvals are based on the item type in the POs/invoices.Direct conversion of PR to PO and PO to multiple invoices.Configuring the approval workflows and building activity-based user permissions
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
We are using GEP SMART to consolidate and optimize our procurement and contract management functions across our entire enterprise. We had an antiquated, aging procurement infrastructure previously, with several stand-alone systems that didn't interoperate well. Our GEP partnership has allowed us to retire old systems, standardize our processes, improve our spend visibility, and position us to be strategic about how we manage our suppliers and spending going forward.
Pros
Ease of use.
Deep functionality.
Outstanding partnership and support.
Cons
Continued execution of their data strategy to enable customers like us.
Continued partnerships and integration strategy for seamless interoperability.
Continue to drive best practices into the toolset so organizations like ours can take advantage.
Likelihood to Recommend
My high rating mostly reflects my confidence in GEP as a strategic partner. There are many technology platforms that would be sufficient; there are many companies that have a good story. However, we believe GEP is the organization to be partnered with as we go forward, giving us confidence that they will be by our side as our company grows and evolves, and that the service offerings and platform will evolve with it - always with the outstanding customer service and partnership that we've come to rely on from them.
VU
Verified User
C-Level Executive in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
SMART by GEP (S2C) is used by all procurement professionals at my company in order to facilitate sourcing events, and author/store contracts once executed. This resolves visibility issues we have as we don't have a single instance of backend systems such as P2P or ERP so having a single instance of S2C helps to search for sourcing events and fully executed procurement contracts across all locations.
Pros
SMART is flexible and scalable.
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.
Cons
SMART tends to be too client-focused. This can be a strength while too client-focused approach would not work well as GEP is gaining diverse clients from different verticals. Some functionality was developed for a specific client and it was pushed to production for general clients to use. At the time, SMART was missing some basic functionality and the engineering team was too busy to react to specific enhancement requests from a small pool of clients that it didn't have time to work on basic functionality.
Generally speaking, SMART is easy to use, but it needs to improve its UI. Some icons are hard to see (web accessibility issues) and not logically placed. Their placement of icons or action menus is not intuitive and will need to be enhanced. I expect GEP to hire professional UX/UI experts to revamp their UX similar to more prevalent apps out there as many users are used to performing certain actions in an app in a certain way. For example, in terms of search functionality, many users are used to how Google search results were displayed and returned. I understand that searching is not GEP's core competency, but users are expecting search functionality to behave like Google search as that is what they are used to. Highly recommend GEP to leverage best practices, market trends, end-user behavioral analysis, etc. when developing logic for functionality.
SMART user guides and release notes will have to be revamped. Oftentimes, their user guides and release notes are not available, or poorly put together with typos. This is an area GEP will have to invest in and bring a technical writer to develop step by step user guides and release notes (before and after screenshots would be much appreciated) to help those who manage SMART so administrators have a clear understanding of logic and how-to prior to new functionality introduction.
GEP delivers comprehensive spend, sourcing, and procurement solutions to our Supply Management team. Their SMART system provides visibility to material spend globally and standardizes our quotation and contract processes throughout all our diverse businesses.
Pros
Support and training.
Working with us on customized solutions.
Ongoing customer relationships and continuous improvement of their solution.
Cons
Would like to see functionality improvements in better automatic communication of information between modules (e.g. Spend, Supplier, Contract, etc.)
Likelihood to Recommend
We have a number of different businesses and ERP systems. GEP SMART has enabled us to achieve visibility of our spending and the ability to implement consistent supply chain practices across our various businesses.
We currently use GEP SMART P2P modules in North America and European commercial sites (one manufacturing site) and the sourcing module is used in NA, EU, and IN. The spend module supports our sourcing team's annual savings goals and provides better visibility for strategy and budget management. The recent supplier portal enablement for our suppliers provides transparency, real-time updates, and more efficient invoice approval processes.
Pros
The spend module supports our sourcing team's annual savings goals and provides better visibility for strategy and budget management.
The recent supplier portal enablement for our suppliers provides transparency, real-time updates, and more efficient invoice approval processes.
SMART modules allow for a great degree of customization and flexibility in processes.
Cons
System slowness is a common complaint among users.
Establish compliant e-invoicing capabilities in Europe.
More mobile capabilities.
More focus on AI innovations.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
The GEP SMART Spend Cube is implemented and used by indirect sourcing and sourcing analytics. Direct spending is not used in SmartSource. We have had approximately 500+ events over the last two years. The eSourcing module is mainly used by Indirect Souring in India. We also have a small number of auctions. We tried to implement the Contracts module however the system was not fit for our purpose and GEP was not willing to customize the tool. The company uses the procurement module however I am not involved with this.
Pros
Willingness to collaborate on the spend cube.
Support for auction events.
Responsiveness of the spend cube GEP team.
Cons
Slowness of the system as you navigate within modules.
Unable to generate reports containing data elements from different sections of the procurement module.
The access levels are extremely complex.
There is a disconnect between modules within the GEP team themselves.
Likelihood to Recommend
The access levels are extremely complex. If the data within your EPR systems is well-populated then GEP SMART is good at importing the data into their spend cubes. The connection between modules within GEP support is weak.
As it relates to my procurement-focused function, our organization uses GEP SMART to create and manage vendors profiles. Create, manage, and solicit bids through their RFx process. Route soft copies of agreements through our approval cycle and solicit digital signatures so that agreements remain digital and searchable. Run spend reports by category, vendor, business unit, etc. The main problem that GEP SMART helped our organization address was the lack of structure and consistency. This suite of products provides structure in the chaotic world of procurement and helps provide metrics that we can share with our business units to help partner together in managing spending.
Pros
Their RFx tool is dynamic and can produce simple RFxs and complex Rfxs. It provides records of when communication was sent and where it was sent to. It also provides a status function so that you can see what stage of the process the respondents are in.
The custom reports are great because they are also dynamic and are quick to run. A report can be created within minutes with all of the required fields that need to be included.
The agreement approval cycle within the Contract module helps document approvals from all of the different stakeholders and provide metrics around how long approvals really take.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
GEP SMART is well suited to equip procurement professionals to manage multiple RFx's at one point in time and help provide structure to the process. If an organization has an existing ERP and they want to acquire GEP SMART as a bolt-on, then integration is key. If there is any customization then it is more difficult to take advantage of the latest upgrades.
GEP SMART is used primarily by the procurement function to understand spending across the company, but also by our finance and audit teams to answer specific queries relating to transactional spend including investigations, and to support audit planning.
Pros
Great user interface and visualisation of data.
Easy interrogation and drill down into data.
Simple reporting tools for extraction of relevant data.
Cons
Faster turnaround for data enrichment which currently takes over a month after the data transfer.
Improved use of artificial intelligence to automate and improve the quality of the data cleansing activity.
Likelihood to Recommend
We currently only use the spend analytics functionality of the tool but have assessed the tool for broader application functionality. We found that the usability of each module was good, the consistency of user interface design between modules could be improved. One area of strength is the ability to cut and dice the spend cube by the supplier, category, management unit, or any other selection and then drill further and further down into the data.
We have multiple ERP/Accounting systems. We needed a tool to gain spend visibility across the enterprise. Smart allowed us to gain a more holistic overview of our supplier spend, rationalize our tools/suppliers and identify other opportunities to reduce spending across the enterprise.
Pros
Normalization of data.
Rationalization of data.
Flexibility/customization of data and queries and reporting.
Cons
GEP has addressed all the issues/requests we've raised, as we've raised them. They have been extremely accommodating and helpful.
Likelihood to Recommend
Great tool for incorporating different spend data from multiple sources.
