GEP SMART

It took some time. You have to really be trained and understand the tool to be able to navigate and understand how to obtain information. The UI looks great, but understanding where to go within the tool can be challenging.

Implementation had hiccups but the output was tremendous in terms of document governance and data governance

This was a major initiative for us, replacing multiple legacy systems and fundamentally changing many of our business processes. Speed of implementation was not a primary driver - quality of implementation and minimizing business impact were of much greater importance. The entire process from initial investigation to go-live took more than 2 years, but our implementation engagement from contract signing to go-live was under a year.

It took us 6 months to go live from the formal project kick-off. Although SMART is a SaaS-based plug and play application, University of California being a public higher education, there were additional compliance-related matters that need to be vetted and with UC's partnership to roll out SMART to its sister university system, California State University, made the implementation more complex and difficult. Otherwise, the implementation timeline would have been much shorter.

Our project actually took nearly 2 years to start delivering results but this was because we had to pause the implementation for over a year whilst we dealt with the problems in our data. GEP was very patient during this period and once the tool had been implemented, we started to see new insights emerging within a few months.

We implemented a phased approach - one module at a time per quarter. Over the course of 12 months, we implemented four modules. This measured approach enabled us to have a global team implementation and provided us the opportunity to increase the adoption rate for a module before implementing the next.

I was not involved in the initial roll out within my organization.

Our organization took multiple years to turn on the different modules. GEP SMART was quick to deploy but the integration process took a good amount of time. The Spend and Supplier module took about a year to get through our organization's integration process. The Contract Module took longer.

A few months.

I was not a part of the implementation process, but have been managing our relationship with GEP SMART from our organization's end. I find that year-over-year speed in the tool improves and any enhancement we request is quickly addressed by our GEP Technical Team.