An honest review of GEP SMART for Spend Analytics
Updated July 06, 2021

An honest review of GEP SMART for Spend Analytics

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with GEP SMART

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.
We only use a single module of GEP SMART, but our analysis has shown that the benefits of having a single integrated platform are significant. The challenge of integrating data across different sources to pay applications is enormous and requires executive commitment for significant investment in data standards, data quality, and data cleansing. Without this commitment, many best-of-breed choices will fail to deliver the full benefits.
  • Before we had GEP SMART, we were simply unable to analyze and report on our external spending and often had to rely on suppliers to tell us how much we were spending with them.
  • Our category teams now have more informed discussions with our business leaders because of the information available within the tool.
The application is highly usable, but there are some parts of the design that could be improved such as the layout and scaling on the pages, the amount of unused white space within the interface, and the consistency of the interface between modules.
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.
Prior to implementing GEP, we were simply unable to interrogate our ERPs to obtain the spend data that we needed. Most of the work required to implement the tool was in understanding the customisations that we have made to our applications and our processes so that we could understand the data in the tool. The work to integrate between the applications was relatively easy once we understood the application designs.
During implementation, we were very careful to test the performance of the tool from multiple global locations and most of the issues turned out to be about the network performance rather than the tool. We have a very large dataset within GEP and despite that, the queries and reports are relatively fast and we do not have complaints from end-users about timeouts or delays. We have also not experienced any delays in integrated systems.
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 roadmap. For this reason, we recently selected an alternative vendor for the replacement of our current Ariba source to the contract suite.
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.

GEP SMART Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Did not purchase premium support as we felt the standard service offering was good enough for our needs and this was found to be accurate post implementation.
The GEP Support team frequently goes above and beyond to understand our business and help us to maximise the value from their solution.
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.

Using GEP SMART

500 - Procurement, Finance, Internal Audit, and Supply Chain.
With the support provided by GEP, we find that we require only minimal internal support for the tool. Our users can interact directly with GEP to get the answers they need, we need to do testing of new product releases and some change management for end-users as well as ensure that the spend data is accurately transferred to their platform but that's all. GEP helps us with training users and all other types of support.
  • Spend data classification.
  • Spend data visualisation.
  • Spend data insights.
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.

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