GEP SMART vs Oracle E-Business Suite iProcurement comparison

"The one we use the most is the sourcing module... It's really easy to use. You don't have to train vendors. You can add a new vendor at any time, and that vendor will get an email saying, "You've been selected to participate in our RFP, and you do X to get your ID set up." That works really well."

"SMART has been helpful for sourcing and public bids. For regulatory purposes, our university posts bids, depending on the scope of the bid. We get a lot of value out of SMART's ability to post to a public site and have suppliers see that information, register in the tool, and participate."

"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."

"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."

"We operate with three different systems that input data. The fact that GEP consolidates all that information into one place is a big deal for us. It streamlines that data for us."

"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."

"The most valuable features are the sourcing and tendering processes."

"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."

"It is a scalable solution."

"It is a scalable product."

"One of the areas where they could do better is by creating more standard templates when it comes to IT cost. IT cost has various components to it and if I want a vendor to be able to reply about cost related to IT, I would have to create that template. If I want them to tell me the hardware costs, the software costs, the professional services costs, the cloud or subscription costs, etc., I would have to build that template myself. Once I built it, I could save it and use it again and again. But sometimes building a template takes a lot of time."

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

"We didn't like their dashboard initially, but they responded to that very well. They've given us some customizable dashboards and have also made it so that the dashboards can be exported into PDF and other formats, so that we can share them with the rest of the company... That was a weakness at the beginning, but one that they have responded to adequately and we're really pleased with the result."

"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."

"We had a lot of challenges and disagreements with SMART. It's been a long road, for sure, on the contract side. There is a little bit of pushback on their part when we need stuff done. Things aren't done very efficiently. I'm still waiting on some changes that were requested well over a year-and-a-half ago."

"The manuals, especially the ones for the suppliers, are currently available only in English. If these can also be translated into different languages, that would be excellent."

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

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

"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 more expensive than one of its competitors."

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