GEP SMART

The GEP SMART solution offers a highly-customizable platform that is extensive in functionality, focusing on keying users in a singular platform, which allowed us to easily streamline our business processes in numerous areas. Additionally, the implementation team was overall extremely helpful in developing the solution quickly and ensuring it would bring significant improvement to our organization. Most users find the platform to be incredibly user-friendly and much more modern than other solutions in the space. Finally, the built-in AI and automation in the tool to offer user assistance and insights was a significant value add for us. The chatbot in particular is going to be very beneficial as it will handle many of the level 1 incident tickets we receive and will ultimately reduce the level of effort our support team.

I enjoy how everything is in one place, and we have approvals in place for projects and suppliers. The support team is also very responsive to tickets, especially when one is high priority.

The overall scalability of the solution enabled our company to address the many customized procurement systems within our non-conventional business through developing many times complex configuration of business rules and tool configurations to work within the many ERPs we operate which enabled us to deploy a single procurement solution across the globe. Their definition of Customer Delight didn't always result in a yes, but many times a no as they challenged us to change away from our legacy bad practices and forced us to rethink our approach, which led us to deploy a scalable solution.

1. Usability, while significantly better than an ERP solution, still has room for improvement. While our users find the interface to be user-friendly, there are some areas of inconsistency in terminology and the experience can vary from module to module. For users who are not used to an online platform this can be confusing and frustrating. Additionally, the out-of-the-box notifications from the platform are not user-friendly and most of our user-base has found them confusing, leading us to need to rewrite 1000s of communications. 2. The reporting capabilities, while functional, could be built with more flexibility. It seems to require a deeper knowledge than the average business user would have and often times the field naming conventions which are reflected in the UI are too long and illogical. The capabilities of the reporting functionality and dashboards don't align with standard sourcing, procurement, or contracting KPIs which resulted in a significant amount of effort for us to get what we needed well past the launch of the modules. 3. Contract lifecycle management lacks some of the more advanced capabilities offered by dedicated CLM platforms. For example, the collaborative redlining and ability to easily modify or amend a contract are clunky, non-user-friendly experiences. The OCR capabilities of uploading existing contracts lacks critical functionality, such as the ability to share and review a contract prior to finalizing the upload into the tool. This required an additional cost for GEP to assist us in loading them into the tool on our behalf.

I wish that admin had more capabilities in the system, for example editing workflows and users in workflows. We have had trouble with the supplier module and get errors often when trying to onboard a supplier. There is a lot of user error that we must go to the support team for help.

There are no dislikes to note as we have only had a positive customer experience.