GEP SMART vs Oracle E-Business Suite iProcurement comparison

"In terms of ease of use, GEP has done a lot of work through its enhancements over the years to make the user experience more intuitive. There is a more standard-Amazon-like experience, where manuals and tutorials are not really required, simply because the user experience and what's on the screen are pretty intuitive."

"Among the most valuable features are the ability to send out purchase orders, create catalogs, and accept invoices through procurement. And the reporting function is robust."

"It's really simple to use. That's one of the reasons we chose GEP over some of the others. It's very Google-like. On the homepage, you just type whatever you need. And there are tabs that can come up if you're looking for a certain word or phrase..."

"The biggest selling point for us was having the contracts repository centralized for both systems. People are able to search for a contract. Typically, before they go out to bid or engage with a supplier, procurement folks come into GEP SMART and they search for a contract and check to see if there is an existing contract in place."

"On the spend side, it's integrated with our accounting system and has bimonthly uploads of data. So we have pretty current spend information that we can access and build reports on."

"Spend gives us a way to put all of our spend in one area and use a category hierarchy to pull real-time spend data."

"One of the most valuable features is the opportunity-identification through the spend analytics. Another is around the RFX options to benchmark various pre-qualified vendors that are invited to participate."

"It's user-friendly, in terms of the design of the tool."

"It is a scalable solution."

"It is a scalable product."

"While it captures all the fields and requirements, when any supplier updates or new supplier registration happens, then the supplier needs to update their bank details. Our IT team has made it so every half an hour the GEP SMART system will push the supplier to the Oracle Database. So, we have faced some problems, like bank details, etc. We addressed this issue with GEP. They are working on it to make bank details a mandatory field for any supplier and match our requirements. Their engineering team has taken up creating a customized process for us."

"There are certain things within the contracts module — how to upload the line items, for example — that could be done to make that utility a little more user-friendly, a little more like the sourcing module."

"I'd like to see drag-and-drop reporting. They have the old model for reports where you have to click the "run" button. The thing runs and then you have to export it to PowerPoint."

"The loading of the contracts could be a little bit easier. I'd like to see a little bit more of AI brought in, to the point that it's actually reading the contract and automating some things, like expiration dates and renewal terms. That is an area for improvement."

"Very recently, they implemented a customer success team to manage our expectations and communicate them to their technical team. That function is relatively new and some work needs to be done to build that connection so that it's a little more seamless."

"We definitely have some asks for enhancements. One of the big ones we'd like to see is what we call "drag-and-drop." If I have an email that I want to maintain in the SMART record for whatever reason — for example, it has supporting information in it — I would love to be able to just drop that into the notes and attachments section without having to save it as a PDF and then upload it."

"Their contracts module is kind of clunky and It took a while for them to correct some of the basic functionality, some of the "Contract Management 101" functions, but it seems to be coming around. It wasn't working the way we'd expected."

"I want to see continued investment in analytics and reporting."

"There could be a mobile application for the product."

"The interface lags a bit since it is a heavy application."

"If our organization could use it as a full-fledged solution, then it would be valuable and give a return on investment. However, since we are not currently using it as a full-fledged solution, even facing some bugs and problems with the synchronization with some of the internal software, we are not able to use it in a full-fledged manner."

"My advice is to think wisely when it comes to estimating the number of licenses that you will require. If you settle on a number too early and you need additional ones, then the extra licenses might be quite expensive."

"The product is somewhat expensive. Only large organizations can handle such an application."

"The product is more expensive than one of its competitors."