GEP SMART vs SAP Ariba Procurement 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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"There are additional time savings in managing communications. If you have an open RFP and there are questions, you can manage all of the questions and answers in the thread inside that RFP. All the suppliers will get any notifications that you want them to get, and everything is within the body of the RFP so you don't have to worry about things in email, outside of the system."

"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..."

"It is one of the best tools in the market."

"The best features are the ease of use and the workflow management that allows me to understand every step in the approval process so that I can forecast the time through my request and its approval."

"It is a stable solution."

"Ariba allows us to manage our suppliers seamlessly."

"Salesforce provides me with the ability to create reports based on various parameters."

"I like the guided buying features."

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

"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."

"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 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."

"There are no mechanisms for them to check up on how they refresh their data. So oftentimes, when we go into the tool and we don't see something, we alert them and they say, "Oh, the data hasn't been refreshed, so we'll go ahead and refresh it," and then what we're looking for pops up. We should not have to be the ones to tell them they need to refresh. There should be a mechanism in place for that."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Salesforce is expensive, with a subscription-based model."

"They should make the solution more user-friendly."

"SAP could make it easier for people to become SAP Ariba consultants within the SAP ecosystem."

"Ariba Procurement tends to integrate best with other SAP products and is harder to work with if you have non-SAP products in your architecture."

"I would like to see more reports coming out of Ariba and more insights because it has to work in connection with SAP. So unless I run SAP and Ariba, I have to run. I am not able to see the utility of Ariba."

"I would like the solution to be more automatic."

"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."

"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."

"The licensing cost depends on the customer."

"It is an expensive solution."

"The license is expensive."