An End User's Perspective of GEP SMART
September 13, 2019
An End User's Perspective of GEP SMART
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with GEP SMART
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.
- 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.
- 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.
My current instance is that GEP is a bolt-on to our ERP. My opinion is that we are not able to leverage GEP's uninterrupted workflow to its full capabilities because of the way our organization integrated with GEP.
- GEP SMART added some structure where there was not much structure before. This change led to a high demand for change management to train individuals on not only the new processes that come with the new structure but also a new tool. This led to some challenges to productivity but with time, our organization is working its way back up to improve efficiency and productivity.
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.
Because of the way our organization integrated with GEP SMART we were unable to use it to its full potential. Our organization added custom questions and custom fields so upgrading to the latest version of GEP SMART has been stalled because of the customizations.