GEP SMART Reviews

For my area, it's the contract module. It's for the lifecycle of contracting. I am in the legal department, and we have attorneys as well as senior legal specialists and legal specialists who work with this, strictly from the drafting and reviewing of the legal side of things. I'm the contract module administrator for the SMART program within our organization. 

This year we did add the sourcing procurement modules to it, which are being used more on the procurement side of our business supply chain. I do nothing with the supply chain sourcing side of it, such as the requests for proposals, the metrics that they're doing with spending analytics, etc.

From a contract perspective, in my opinion, SMART has improved things a hundred-fold. Change is hard for anybody, and we had a rough start with it. The first year that we were in it, it was a nightmare, to be honest. And GEP is very aware of that. But it definitely is a time-saver, once people learn how to correctly use it. It also reduces our risk at a lot of different levels. Eventually, people are going to trust it as a source of truth for contracting purposes.

Our compliance and accreditation agencies are able to see that we have our arms around this. 

One of the most important things is that the risk is reduced. A good example is that we have corporate compliance language in all of our documents. The reason we have that is because, as a healthcare organization, there are certain regulations we have to follow with Medicare exclusions or government payer exclusions. Those things get updated yearly, if not more. We know for a fact that there were people out there using corporate compliance language from three years ago. Even though I had updated it in certain templates, people didn't have access to them. Now, I will have that in the clause library in SMART. That alone is a huge risk reduction for this organization. It could literally cost millions of dollars if not done correctly, if something were to happen because we didn't have the right language in there. If something bad happened, we could have to pay back the U.S. government X amount of dollars. That's worst-case scenario, obviously, but it happens. Healthcare is vicious. By having those clauses available right in this tool for everyone, and everyone knowing that they are updated as needed, that risk is reduced to almost nil. You still have human error in there. Anytime you have a human touching it, you're going to have a potential risk, but it's certainly a lot less than it was a year ago.

There's a transparency here we didn't have before. For example, our system is pretty large. We have 11 or 13 hospitals now. With our previous tool, the regional hospitals, outside the main hospital, were not able to view certain agreements, but they were required to pay invoices under them or to abide by the terms and conditions of certain agreements that they couldn't even see. Now they can see them, because of the way that the users have access to this tool. They're able to go in and see the terms and conditions and see what their part is in that arrangement and see what they should be billed. That way, they know that they're paying the right amount and know that the deliverables are correct. We didn't have that in the past. They were getting copies of contracts that they thought were the right contracts, but they weren't certain. So that risk level has been reduced.

I love it because everything is done within the contract module. The previous tool that we had really acted more as a repository, whereas this is the lifecycle. Once a business owner gets to the point where they want to enter into a contractual relationship with a party, from that point, including the drafting of it through to the signature on it, it covers the lifecycle. It's from the beginning to the end to even the archiving. It's all done within the tool, including e-signature. Rather than having negotiation and revisions and different versions outside of the tool and using it as a filing system, everything is done within the tool. It's more transparent. Anyone who needs to see what's going on can see it. It saves a lot of time for people trying to track things down. I love it.

It's so intuitive. Version 2.0 is head-and-shoulders above what 1.0 was. It's a lot more user-friendly. I like to call it "Google-ish." The search mode makes more sense. It's more what people are used to. I think it's super-easy to use.

I'm doing less and less training, which means that when I train, people get it. And when I do my education session, you can see the light bulbs going on. I'm not training as much because it's a lot easier to understand. They provided really detailed, quick reference guides for us this time, that make sense. That's been really helpful.

The difficulty we had when we first started was that we had to migrate all of our records from our previous tool which is a program called Ntracts, a contract tool. We were only using it as a repository. They have upgraded it where it's supposed to be more of a lifecycle tool, like SMART is, but I've not heard good things about it.

GEP had never migrated anything from Ntracts before, and the information within Ntracts was not compatible with the information that was needed for SMART. Then, they put somebody new on the migration but it was a huge process. We had 50,000-plus contracts in Ntracts that had to be migrated to SMART. It was a big ask and it went horribly wrong, and we ended up having to do a second migration. We spent a year trying to migrate, and then we had to just tank it and start over. Needless to say, it was not well-received. It put a bad taste in peoples' mouths at first but we're past that. We got the migration done and we have happy people. 

Some of the rough spots in it have more to do with the things that we want and require within the tool, rather than the tool itself. Some of the forms or questions that we've asked them to incorporate and customize for us are the things that our users sometimes struggle with. It's more what we're asking them to provide, versus how to use the tool.

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. And that would be helpful if I have a pre-signed document rather than having it e-signed in SMART. There are times when we have to have it signed outside of SMART. I would like to be able to just drag-and-drop that from my computer, rather than having to upload it. It would save three steps.

We have a lot of asks that we've found over the last two years of using this. There are things that we have felt, "Oh my God, this would make so much more sense. Why isn't it like this?" 

I've got a pet peeve. They have different terms that they use throughout the systems. For example, on the cover sheets that we use, under Basic Terms, they might refer to the author as the "contract administrator." But if I go into the system to run a report, and I'm the contract administrator who is the author, if I want to run a report about every record that I've worked on, it's called "author" in that section. It's really confusing, although not so much for me, because I'm in it every single day. But for other people who don't, it's confusing. "Contract type" means, in some areas, the coordinating area that's working on it. But in other areas it really means, what is this contract. But sometimes that's referred to as "document type." It's confusing and inconsistent.

We've talked to them and they're aware of it. To me, that's low-hanging fruit. Fix it. It's just being sloppy. It was a problem in 1.0. When they went to 2.0, it became worse because they changed terms on the cover sheet. So now, not only are they still different, they're new. So everything we got used to in 1.0 — even though it was not consistent throughout, we were starting to get used to it — was changed in 2.0. And it's still not consistent.

We went live with SMART 1.0 in 2017. We upgraded to 2.0 in May of this year.

The team that we work with weekly, our customer support team, is amazing. They're very responsive. We go over what tickets are open and we go over what we call "questions." Some of our stuff doesn't rise to the point of being a ticket. It's not like a fix is needed. It's more like, "We have this question. Is this working right? or, "Are we doing this right?" or, "Is this is how this is supposed to work?" We do those kinds of things every week and it's great.

But then we have times where we submit a ticket and it's not something our customer support team can handle because it has to be sent to the engineers, or it has to be sent to the technical team. Once it gets away from our team, oh Lord, it can take forever. I think that that is very common in IS worlds. Different teams have different relationships. If you're lucky to be with a team that has a cohesive relationship with the other team, you're good to go and you can get anything done that you want to. But I think that's rare.

For example, in our organization, if I need something done in IS, I don't send a ticket. I call somebody I know in IS and I say, "All right, I'm going to put it in this ticket. And I'm telling you I'm putting in this ticket because I need you to pull it and get it to the right person." If I don't tell somebody that, it won't get done. And I think the same kind of thing goes on at GEP. If I file a ticket and it gets done fast, it's because our dedicated customer support team was able to do it. 

In terms of the adoption of the platform in our organization, people in general are really resistant to any change. It was a lot of work. The work upfront was so time-consuming that people were really resistant to it. I don't think everybody felt like this was the answer to our issues at the beginning.

Then, when we got into it and had problems with it, it was a nightmare. But with that said, once we were able to migrate our legacy documents from our old tool into this, and were able to show that, yes, in fact, the tools that we need work in this, people started to come around. They saw we were able to find what we need. We were able to connect master agreements to their amendments, master agreements to their SOWs. We were able to archive as we needed and could clear them per our retention policies. We could do everything we needed to do, right within this tool, rather than having to go through boxes of stored files. 

People are really becoming comfortable with this. And now, with these added modules and having everything connected and being able to actually pull valuable information about their metrics, to get their arms around spend here, it's going to be even more significant in the coming year.

In terms of the solution's AI and machine-learning, a bunch of people from our organization are at the GEP Innovate '19 conference that's going on right. AI is one of the big things they're focusing on there. We have not really gotten into that. One of our attorneys actually just got back from a fraud-and-abuse conference that the American Health Lawyers Association put on, and that topic was addressed in a big way there. AI and cybersecurity were two big topics that were covered at that conference. I'm sure AI is something our organization will be exploring in the future with GEP. I'm sure it has already been brought up. I'm sure that the individuals who went to that conference this week will bring it back and follow up.

We use this tool in our supply chain department as our SRM tool. It interfaces to our business operating system, which is managed by SAP. The supplier module interfaces, through middleware called TIBCO, to our vendor master in SAP. The sourcing events primarily stay in GEP. The contracts module can be created and the workflow executed in GEP, and then it can create an SAP contract. Our purchase orders, requisitions, and work orders are all created in SAP and go to the cloud and the vendor through the portal in P2P.

We have the spend module, the supplier module, sourcing, contract, and P2P. It is 100 percent in the cloud.

There are aspects that are probably difficult to measure but I'd like to point to them first. One of them is simply compliance. We are a publicly regulated utility, and along with that comes special controls and compliance features. We've got the SOX controls that everyone else has. The ability to create contracts and set them up through the workflow, and have them available, both as a contract to select from, and as a catalog to pull a material or service item from in the GEP tool in the cloud, is really a benefit that is unique. Users simply cannot get that in our SAP system. 

Our requisition-to-PO time has improved because we've got stock, numbered items set up on contracts and those can be picked from and attached to the requisition and issued automatically.

In addition, we have suppliers that go through the supplier module, which links with SAP, and the reporting on those suppliers for sourcing and for contracts is enhanced. And we are writing interface code between ISNetworld, our third-party safety provider, and GEP to better manage our service contractors.

The source-to-pay, or S2P, functionality has contributed to the digital transformation of our company. The source-to-pay would be sourcing contracts in P2P. We built interfaces between it and SAP to help our buyers do their work more efficiently. For instance, when a supplier receives a purchase order, they can confirm that purchase order through GEP. The interface then comes back into SAP and automatically fills out the SAP confirmation that the supplier received the purchase order. Any change requests are managed through the buyer. The buyer can edit the purchase order and re-issue the PO back to the supplier. A great deal of time is saved because, the old way, the buyer had to print off a fax and then manually go into the purchase order in change mode and add the confirmation manually. That would take five or ten minutes of the buyer's time, so if there were five or six that they were going to confirm, that could easily take a half hour. Now, all that is done automatically through the interface.

In terms of the efficiency of our procurement processes, back in 2015, our buyers were very tactical. Their scope of work was primarily managing requisitions and creating purchase orders. Now, our buyers are able to perform much more strategic work, and can begin to set up automatic purchase orders and work with contracts with the suppliers. That is something which, previously, had only been performed by commodity managers. So the efficiency of our team today is greatly enhanced through GEP.

The solution integrates with our ERP system. It's been built into the flow and the processes, so it's a pretty natural interface right now.

In terms of the solution saving us time when setting up an RFP, if we're going to do a three-bid buy, a simple RFP, it is done in SAP and issued out to the supplier through the portal. If we're going to do a sourcing event, that would be done in the tool. The commodity managers can create an event using the templates and have GEP as a complete repository of all of their events. They can bring in subject matter experts to evaluate the proposals. It's really a nice tool with great features that have improved the efficiencies and been of benefit to the commodity managers for sourcing. We do not have any metrics that really measure commodity manager efficiencies, but we do have general meetings between the director and the leadership and the commodity managers to evaluate their progress and understand what strategic things they're working on. Through that, the leadership can see whether we are where we think we should be in terms of managing the projects that we have.

I don't really tend to rank the features, but the portal from the supplier experience is dramatically updated and brought into this century from the old fax transmission and even Write Fax.

The spend module is really amazing and lightning-fast. It can give even the most novice of analysts access to the information needed and the ability to tweak it the way they want to see it. It has a lot of flexibility.

And the dashboards can collect all of that information and be repeatably produced almost instantaneously and can be set up in the background.

The supplier module really unlocks the sourcing and the contract modules. 

We really like the contract module because it gives us an established workflow. For those people that love to have established processes, it's great. For people who want to be renegades and do what they want and "speed down the interstate" and make the rules up as they go; those people aren't going to tend to like an established process that they are confined to. But with the workflow that we developed, there's still a lot of flexibility, and the contract owner still has the ability to manage the contract through the workflow pretty effectively. I think we've got a nice, established process with an established workflow, but still have the flexibility so something doesn't get stuck for a week just because one person is not available.

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 because the user experience and what's on the screen are pretty intuitive. Even basic users can utilize the tool because it's pretty easy and straightforward. They've incorporated those concepts throughout all their modules.

I do not know how they could get better in spend. That's a pretty great module.

We could probably take advantage of some of their available wizards and develop some intake efficiencies for the process so that it's not quite as much just data entry and creating certain profiles. We have not gone into the 2.0 version. The whole dynamic and interface between the modules may be improved or it may be the same thing that just looks a little bit different.

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'm interested to see how that might work.

We went live in 2015.

In today's market, the stability into the future can change with a phone call in the next hour. However, the growth that the business side of GEP has achieved over the course of the last five years, and their client-centric view of their business and business model, are things that give me confidence that they will be stable for the future, and for years to come.

It has scalability from a tiny micro-business all the way up to a multinational, multicultural mega-company. I know with their clients that they are able to cover some of the largest companies in the world, as far as scalability goes. I don't know if they would market down to the tiny businesses, ones with less than ten people, but from what I've seen, they definitely could.

In our company there are roughly 500 to 600 users who have a login to the tool. The vast majority of them are subject matter experts who are going to review a contract. There are also contract approvers, and then there are people from legal, people from risk, and some people from accounting. Within supply chain there are users in the leadership, as well as administrators, buyers, and commodity managers. Maintenance is relatively small. We don't have very much IT impact anymore; that only happens on enhancements. So maintenance is one or two people and they're from IT.

We are looking to add more contracts and catalogs, and we are looking to potentially utilize the tool as a corporate-wide repository for all of our contracts.

Technical support is pretty good. It got better once we got a steady-state customer service representative.

The customer service through the implementation was phenomenal. But once we went live, we weren't sure who we should call. We weren't going to call the main contact for the module anymore. We started to go through the general service desk and sometimes the answer didn't come back like we expected it to come back. We just didn't understand. And we didn't know who to go to. Back in 2017, they recognized the gap and developed within their organization a steady-state customer service department. That has really helped steady that aspect of their customer service.

The customer service rep is typically located in your time zone. That person has become a great resource for us. We have a weekly meeting set up just to talk about and look at the calls that have come in during the last week, and any open action items that we're working on.

In addition, every year GEP conducts a product advisory-council session. Their top clients all come in and meet. That is something that could be fairly controversial for some providers. But GEP welcomes that input and fosters that environment and relationship with its main clients because they want to hear what the thoughts are that are out there, and they want to get better. They want their product to be better because of that cooperative type of environment. They bring us all together in a big room and we talk about their stuff.

We did not really have a previous solution. For spend, we used Excel and pulled tables from SAP. But we had nothing close to the tool that we've got now. The supplier module was managed inside SAP with an Excel profile template. For the sourcing module, we did have Iasta but we discontinued that relationship; GEP replaced it. We had a home-grown contracts repository and workflow, but that was pretty ineffective, much less effective than GEP.

The initial setup was very complex. We did not have a large team on the implementation so it felt like it progressed slowly. Overall, the deployment took about a year-and-a-half.

Our implementation strategy initially started as a "big bang," but we quickly realized that that wasn't going to be doable, given the amount of work and training and the conversions of the processes needed. We had two project managers on the implementation who quit and moved on before I ever really became involved in the implementation. So the project was on its third project manager, and I went through the third, fourth, and fifth project managers before we got it implemented.

I have made a very flat declaration that I would not advise that type of process to anyone who tries to implement an across-the-board system like this. They need to have a dedicated team. Those resources need to be made available to the team for subject matter experts, and then training and culture change. Whether it's the ADKAR model or something else, experts in that, in their organization, need to be brought along with the implementation team.

We did not have a third-party come in. We had our own IT and our own project manager, and the supply chain group working on the modules themselves.

We had a budget item that got nixed from our budget in 2010 and 2011 and then it finally passed in 2013. We started a sourcing event. I was not part of the sourcing event but we looked at some ten to 15 service providers and roughly half of those are no longer in business anymore. The sourcing event on our side had criteria that evaluated the marketplace which had to do with cost, quality, scalability, flexibility, ease of doing business, and growth with us. It came down to SAP Ariba and GEP and we decided on GEP.

It's very important to have people who understand the depth of the technical aspects of their processes and how their systems work. Also, there needs to be a keen understanding and awareness of what the regulatory requirements are of their processes, what their key controls are. If those members are not on that team, there can be some real problems within a year if there are regulatory requirements that are not addressed in the day-to-day operation of those systems.

As for the adoption of the platform in our company, initially, we were pretty hesitant and resistant to change. But when people started to use it they really started to like the tool. It has taken a while, and the contracts module is probably the very last one to really get adopted. We've been pretty attached to it for the last two years and it is generating momentum to become the corporate-wide contracts repository for all of our corporate contracts, not just those created to work in supply chain. So that is a tremendous win, culturally, for adoption with the tool.

The experience is probably different for every single user, but I like how fast the tool is. The response time is great. It is so fast through the cloud. They've really been able to maximize that. The spend module is just fascinating with how fast it is.

Inside the procurement functionality of supply chain, we put our purchase orders to our suppliers through the portal, through GEP. We can write contracts and approve and execute those contracts through the GEP system. But SAP is where we would create the purchase order and release it in SAP. So we do not create purchase orders or do goods receipts or service entries in GEP. We do that in SAP. 

The fact that the GEP solution is a single, unified software platform for our company has had a positive effect, but it is not our single solution because we interface with SAP. An example of how it has affected our company is that our spend analytics are all in one place. My director sent me a message at something like 6:30 in the evening, when he was at a dinner, and asked me our spend with a certain supplier. I was able to get onto GEP and send him a snapshot of the spend in a matter of moments. The difference between GEP and our previous models is that, back then, he might have asked three different people and gotten three different answers. With GEP, it's going to be the single answer that is correct, because it's consistently pulling from the tables.

The solution's AI and machine-learning features have not affected our procurement processes at this point. We're looking at that from an accounts-payable standpoint, managing and processing invoices, but not on the procurement side.

We use it for spend analytics. I'm on the procurement team in my company and it's used for reviewing how each of our departments is spending.

We also use it for payment-term analysis, evaluating how many payment terms our company has with vendors. We try to use that information to standardize the payments that we have and to look for working-capital benefits, in some cases, with vendors that we have shorter pay terms with. 

It has consolidated a couple of different spend avenues that we have. Our accounting team, our finance team, and procurement used to have three different realms in which we would look at the spend information. We would get fairly close, but not as close as we would like. GEP has helped gather the spend from those different arenas and put them into one, singular case so that we can compare apples to apples each month.

It's given us greater visibility to all-spend. It's helped with the classification of spend. We can look at things based on GLs, but it's allowed us to classify spend so that we can look for opportunities to save, as a procurement team.

In terms of that classification, the AI tool definitely has learned from the information we've given it but also from some of the corrections that we've made. It may have auto-applied a classification and then we have gone in and corrected it, given it some feedback. With that, more and more, we are not having to touch the information once it gets processed. It's classifying it from the get-go in the correct category. That helps us because it allows each of our procurement managers in different departments to really see everything that's in their realm, without having to look for mistakes or nuances. It's become fairly knowledgeable.

It has given us visibility, and we'll see historical data, whenever we are creating an RFP. It does give us a better insight as to all the spend in that category. We can formulate future project requests more clearly.

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. 

There are also some AI tools that GEP uses in helping us find opportunities. That has been beneficial as well.

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, people who are not necessarily users on GEP. That was a weakness at the beginning, but one that they have responded to adequately and we're really pleased with the result.

I've been using SMART for about two years. The organization has been using it for two-and-a-half years.

We have not had any significant crashes. We've had minor bugs, but their customer service has been really strong and they've responded, each time, very quickly and given us fair timelines as to when they expect to have it up. They are usually right on time with those timelines for fixing bugs. We have not had any significant stability issues, just small ones with tweaking. It's mainly when there have been upgrades. They've come out with a new version and they have had a couple of bugs. They responded quickly to those.

We implemented the tool at a time when we were tripling in size as a company. They've been able to handle a massive increase in data fairly well. In terms of users, we haven't changed much since we first implemented it. We have about ten users. Each of them is a procurement manager over a different spend category, mainly in the indirect realm but a couple of them are in the direct materials realm as well.

We have some plans to increase its usage in the future. We met with them recently just to discuss what additional resources and tools they offer. We're not subscribed to every bell and whistle they have. We're strongly considering what it would be like to increase the number of tools and more fully use the services that they offer.

I deal with both first-tier tech support and our account manager. We filter a lot of our requests and information through him and he's been great.

We did not have a previous solution.

I was not part of the integration of it into our system. I came onboard about six months after they had done that.

It's fairly easy to use. There was a short time period for onboarding SMART, where GEP gave plenty of instructional training. And they've provided some good responses to questions, as I have continued to learn. But I and my team find it could be fairly quickly adopted.

To fully understand what the product offers took a month's time, but that was because there were a number of different tools and tricks within the software. There were multiple things that we had to learn.

There has been fairly good adoption of the solution in our organization. I'm one of the main, super-users. In a lot of cases, my colleagues have relied upon me to find the information for them because I am in it daily. They feel comfortable using the tool as well, but not to the degree that I do. They've been good users of the tool, but because this is my specific role, they've simply relied upon me for that usage.

There are two other teammates of mine who help in maintaining the tool. They are also procurement managers.

We have seen a return on investment, both in the direct materials and indirect material realms. Whenever we get a line-item price variance, we've seen some ROI in terms of being able to capture when pricing has changed and wasn't what was contracted. We've also seen it in terms of the payment-terms analysis. There's a monetary value to that.

It has definitely saved time. Before, we were bringing financial information from three different systems and that was laborious. GEP does it for us now.

The costs are all built-in.

We have found it to be a beneficial program with a lot of different resources that we still have yet to explore. I don't think we've tapped out yet on what it offers.

Through using GEP, we've been able to gain respect. The other departments in our company have come to rely upon us even more. We have become a more trusted department within the company, among our peers, because we can speak to their spend at greater depth.

It is not currently connected with our ERP system, but that's something that we have discussed with GEP as a possibility in the future.

We use it for streamlining the source-to-contract process, from opportunity identification through to negotiation and contracting for preferred vendors.

It's a SaaS model.

One of the key functions of the sourcing group is to have a detailed understanding of who we spend money with, how much we spend with them, and what we're buying. It's helped us achieve that objective because we have multiple financial systems and it consolidates all of them for us. It identifies opportunities to save money through our procurement processes.

The fact that it's a single, unified software platform for our whole organization has positively affected our procurement operations because we get a single view of each of our vendors. Unlike some of the other source-to-contract suites, all of the modules are integrated. If we want to look up a particular vendor, we'll be able to see everything about their spend, what contracts we have with them, what sourcing events we invited them to, any of their supplier ratings, any savings that we've achieved around them, and all of that in a single view.

In terms of the efficiency of our procurement processes, in the past we were sending out all of these RFPs through email and they would get stuck in firewalls and we wouldn't have any idea of the progress of the vendors until the due date had arrived. Here, we can see in real-time which vendors have acknowledge receipt. We can see that they are 30 percent done or they're 40 percent done. They can put questions on their bulletin boards that we see, and the other vendors see anonymously. We wouldn't be able to manage these processes manually. Sometimes we invite 20 or 30 vendors for a request for information process to down-select to finalists, and it would be almost impossible to manage without the tool. It saves us days of time. We wouldn't be able to initiate some of our procurement processes without this tool.

It uses AI machine-learning to help us categorize what the vendor does for us and the particular goods or services they have. It looks at various data points and it learns if it's this GL account, the description it should have, and which category that spend should be mapped to. As a result, we understand who the vendors are that are providing fulfillment services or creative agency services. We wouldn't be able to do that without the AI and machine-learning capabilities for the spend analytics solution.

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 has a user-friendly user interface. You don't have to be an IT expert. It's intuitive in terms of drag-and-drop and maximizing the functionality. Everyone who's used it has found it to be user-friendly and beneficial. That is positive.

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.

In terms of additional functionality, most of what we'd like are on the roadmap, like bid optimization functionality. 

Also, some of the modules don't have the same user interface as the others. We'd like to see them all made uniform.

We've been using SMART for about a year-and-a-half.

It has been relatively stable. We had some performance issues in terms of availability this past week, but they were resolved. There were a few days when the performance was spotty for the sourcing module, but they corrected that.

The scalability has been fine.

Particularly on the contracts module, it's underutilized right now, but we plan to expand usage over time.

They are responsive. As soon as we send something, they acknowledge it. There have been a few things that have slipped through, but for the most part they're responsive and they eventually take care of the issue.

We had nothing before this. This is a new, center-led procurement organization. We introduced a whole new team, new processes, and a whole new technology suite. Everything was manual before.

I was brought in to lead the new team and I had used similar technology at my previous employer and realized that we needed to implement it here. We were a small team and had to be as efficient as possible.

The initial setup was straightforward. They did everything for us since it's software as a service. There were regular project meetings and they helped us with integration testing. It went smoothly. The deployment took three months. There were only three people involved from our team, so it wasn't anything significant from that point of view.

The goal was to get it up as quickly as possible so that we could benefit from the efficiencies.

We did not use a systems integrator.

We saw ROI right away, even after the first year. There were cost savings that we validated which were achieved through the tool.

The solution was somewhat comparable to what is on the market. 

There are no other "gotchas." The licensing and maintenance are all in one. There was a project implementation team cost but that was just one time and they didn't overrun.

We engaged about a half-a-dozen vendors, including SAP Ariba, Ivalua, Zycus, and BravoSolution.

We went with GEP because of the single view, their customer service, and the fact that they also have a professional services arm — sourcing and procurement practitioners — that they use in their software development.

It's a huge efficiency tool and it has really accelerated our ability to drive the procurement business case in terms of cost savings.

I would recommend it. We have had some challenges with the contracts module and some performance issues but they recently resolved all those.

We haven't integrated it with our ERP, which is SAP. If we were to implement procure-to-pay, transactional procurement would have to integrate with that.

We don't maintain the GEP solution, we just use it. They're responsible for uptime and ticket resolution. We have biweekly meetings with our customer account manager to review all the enhancements, issues, and improvements. They do all the work for us.

We have about a dozen end-users of the solution.

We use it in our supply management group for contract management and spend analytics.

On our contract side, we're in v2.0. And on our spend side we're also in v2.0.

We brought in a third-party company, Adobe, to do our e-signature. There's an integration there which was very beneficial for us and what we do. And it enables our vendors to not have to log in to the system to sign an agreement. They get a direct email from Adobe, sent from SMART. They can just click on the link and sign it and then it comes back to SMART. That was a huge thing for us. 

The basics of what we use it for and what the product offers work really well for us in terms of contract creation, from beginning to end. Overall, it does what we need it to do. 

Since we only have the two modules, we actually find them both very valuable. It gives us everything that we need for building a contract from scratch and using electronic signatures.

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. On that side it's very easy to use, very straightforward. We don't have a lot of issues in spend.

On the contract side, we have definitely come across a lot of pain points since I've been here. There were some issues with our initial implementation. It wasn't done correctly and it's been a process over a few years to recover from that. There were a lot of lessons learned on their side and our side, and there are still things that we're trying to work through that, maybe, weren't understood properly in the beginning. We're still continuing to try to build it for what we use it for, which is different than what some of their bigger clients may use it for. We've had to do a lot of cleanup and make a lot of changes.

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. These certain items have been bumped up to the president of the company.

In addition, there is a lot of information that we have to put in that is not useful for us, but we have no control over that because it's hard-coded into the program. There's a lot of stuff there that we just don't need or use. It would be better if we were able to turn off all the things that we don't need. The way it is right now makes things seem unclean and not tidy because there's all this information we have to put in that we don't even use. Being able to turn off tabs and fields that other SMART clients use but we don't would be nice, just to simplify it and not have to see them or fill them in.

The company has had this solution for about four-and-a-half years. I came in when it had already been in use for a year-and-a-half to two years. In the past, I still was doing manual agreements and printing paper and having people wet-sign documents. So for me, this is a way better solution than how we did things in the past.

It's hard to say what the solution's stability is like. I feel like it would be nice to start from scratch, because we still have some nagging issues with our categories and certain other things. However, we've made the best of it.

For what we use it for, the basics work great for us. We haven't used the other module. I've never personally used another contract management system, so I have nothing to compare it to.

Overall, SMART's technical support is slow. There has been a lot of miscommunication. There's a time barrier with a lot of the technical support people being in India, as well as a language barrier in understanding.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but it was kind of an ongoing thing, even when I started. There was never an implementation person from SMART who came here to help with implementation. I think that was an issue. Nobody came here, to our Canadian office, or to our US location. So our US officed opted not to use it because the functionality was a bit of a mess.

One of our employees who is no longer here deployed the SMART solution and one of our team leads was involved as well.

Our implementation strategy for the solution, initially, was to get every single vendor we deal with into the system. And if we didn't have the proper information, they put in "dummy information" such as a made-up email address. This caused a lot of issues for us because when you create a profile, the first contact that you put in becomes your primary contact and also holds the username for logging in. Because there was a dummy user email, none of our vendors could log in. There were a lot of phone calls and it caused a lot of issues. On top of that, we did not need all of our vendors in the system, so I'm not sure why that was decided. We really only needed vendor profiles in there for vendors who had a live contract or agreement with us.

We ended up dumping over 4,000 vendors into the system, and it was a nightmare. When I came on board, I spent a lot of time cleaning that up and had GEP delete thousands of profiles. We don't have the ability to delete a profile. They will not give us that ability. So I had to run reports and send them to SMART and have them do mass deletion. But it didn't come easy because they were very resistant to that for the longest time, until we said this is not an option anymore. We want them gone. There was no need to have all those vendor profiles in the system when we didn't even have contracts or agreements with them.

I think we have seen return on investment by going with SMART.

We pay an annual fee but I'm not sure how much it is.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using the solution is around the thinking through of the implementation, having support for that, and doing better planning for it. Most companies have an implementation team and that's definitely the way to do it. If you have to initially, with any program, start manipulating the system by using dummy information, that's probably a red flag.

One of the enhancements that just came out is an idea that came from our group several years ago for a contract and spend integration — bringing in contracts and spend together for reporting. They have always been reported separately. We could report in contract or in spend, but not contract and spend together. They liked this idea, and it's taken them a couple of years to roll it out, but they wanted to roll it out for all their clients. They reprogrammed that into the system and that actually just finally came into production about a week ago, so we haven't had a chance to really use it at this point. But hopefully, we will be able to use it for what we need.

Only supply management is actively using the system here in our Canadian office. We have about 15 to 20 users, mostly on the spend side, and a handful using the contracts side of things. And about three people using it in our US office. Deployment and maintenance of the solution pretty much all falls on me. I'm the admin of our GEP system. Our IT does have admin access as well, but we don't use them, for the most part, for adding or deleting users. It all comes through me.

I don't know how many vendors we have in the system but I would estimate it at 1,000. However, once they do their profile and registration, I would say they don't use it.

Overall, I would give the solution a seven out of ten. It does need some work and there needs to be more flexibility. The big reason we used it was the fact that we could customize a lot of things to fit our needs. However, the system still seems very rigid in how it works, so we've had to do a lot of workarounds. There's definitely room for improvement.