GEP SMART Reviews

We're leveraging SMART for four of their modules. We use it for sourcing, contracts, suppliers, and spending. However, we're not leveraging it for procurement to pay the downstream operations based on our current technical infrastructure. The most common use cases stem from procurement on the sourcing side for a need to go out to bid. And then on contracts, flipping those sourcing events to a contract or the awarded RFPs. For contracts, any master agreement that we do is also added into SMART. It's mainly used as a post-execution lifecycle management tool on the contract side. Based on our kind of utilization and desire, we have pre-execution capabilities enabled, but based on the maturity of our organization, we are actively leveraging it in that manner.

SMART's source-to-pay feature has helped us undergo a digital transformation. We're only using upstreams and not the procure-to-pay side of SMART but it has definitely transformed our operations. It's encouraging us to streamline, especially as we leverage functionality with e-auctions and more of the authoring capabilities that SMART has already. It's continuing to transform our organization.

SMART also helps with standardization, especially on the RFX side, by providing standardized templates. However, even though we're not fully leveraging SMART's authoring capabilities, we have the latest templates, which is huge from a compliance perspective. SMART's AI and machine learning capability has made a difference, especially on the spending side. We have  10 ERPs across our organization, and GEP's robust AI/ML can normalize our suppliers and categorize our spending across those 10 source systems. That's been huge in terms of our ability to analyze spending across our entire organization appropriately.

Having a single unified software platform has simplified our procurement operations. Before leveraging SMART we didn't have a single system on the contract side to manage our file folders, file cabinets, shared drives, etc. It was antiquated before. Having a single system with high visibility across the system has allowed us to increase our collaboration and our purchasing power because we're able to leverage our economies of scale better.

There are three main reasons that we started working with this product. The first one was to plan projects and report the savings. In this use case, we rely on GEP as a reporting tool for procurement.

The second reason we use it is for online sourcing. In this context, it gives us a platform to run online RFPs, RFIs, and online auctions.

The third reason is to use it for a contract repository.

In terms of how easy this product is to use, I would say something in the middle. It can be very complex, so it requires some training for the users. Especially for sourcing, it requires some detailed training.

It is possible to simplify things. We can create simple projects and simple sourcing events.

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

GEP SMART is a unified platform that has definitely affected our procurement operations. It is part of our procurement strategy that we increase the usage of online sourcing. The fact that we use project sourcing and contracts means that these three modules support our source-to-contract process, which is one of the key processes of upstream procurement.

The tool helps us, firstly because it provides clear reporting. Second, we gain additional and incremental savings through only sourcing, especially through online auctions. Third, it helps us to be more efficient and transparent within the organization. For example, in procurement, GEP SMART helps facilitate information sharing between teams.

Using this product has significantly improved the efficiency of our procurement process. The more products or sourcing events, RFPs, and auctions that we have in the system, the more efficient it will be with the next project because it can start as a copy of a previous one. Doing so significantly reduces the preparation time of the RFPs and auctions.

GEP enables us to create different templates that we can store in the tool and use. This shortens the time required to prepare the tenders and then publish them to the suppliers. 

The platform also allows us to invite more suppliers because supplier management during the sourcing processes is faster and more efficient. We can manage multiple suppliers at the same time.

This product definitely saves us time when setting up an RFP. The first RFP needs to be created from scratch and requires some time but for any future RFPs, where we have things to repeat or do for a second time, it helps us to be faster and more efficient. The amount of time we save depends on the complexity of the RFP but it can be hours.

In summary, using this solution benefits our organization through cost savings, better efficiency, improved transparency, and having information archived.

With respect to the adoption of the platform in the company, for projects, it was pretty easy. It was also very well accepted because our key KPI is related to savings, which is done through the project reporting. This meant that people were highly motivated to use the reporting.

There is slower adoption for sourcing because it requires having quite good knowledge about how to use the product. Furthermore, the suppliers need to agree to participate in online sourcing events. It's not just about our company, but also about the suppliers, because they have to accept it.

It's going a little bit slower than we would like it but our company has a program running to help with this. We have been onboarding procurement teams in different affiliates around the world, and we teach them how to use the GEP solution for sourcing. This program has been live for approximately four years and we have onboarded between 25 and 30 procurement teams from around the world.

For contracts, the adoption is improving. Our aim is to have the top affiliates using all of the modules in three years.

We are using it mainly for the RFQ, RFP, tendering, etc. 

We are also using it for contract management. Though, we haven't completely used all aspects of the contract management, e.g., we have used the supplier evaluation. We are uploading the contracts, then it is giving us reminders for renewals. For the contract administration part, we are getting notifications from the system. 

We have used it for a sealed bid and evaluation. It has functioned well.

We are using it for sourcing management. Since we have DOA approvals in the Oracle system, we cannot use the purchase requisition as well as a purchase order process in GEP SMART. When a request is coming from the user department, it will need approvals. Once it has the system approvals, it comes as a notification. Then, we will use GEP SMART as a standalone program to function from tendering until finalizing the tender. We then take that final result back to Oracle for the approval process. That is how it functions.

There is a bit of hesitation within the organization to completely adopt the system changes. Since there is involvement from various departments, e.g., legal and finance, there are challenges because we already use other systems. If the entire system would be GEP SMART from the beginning, then acceptance would be much better than implementing it in the middle.

We use SMART by GEP for spend management. It is heavily used for enterprise spend and diversity reporting. We've been using it primarily for the latter, which is good. We report our diversity spend out to our board of directors on a quarterly basis. In order to do diversity spend, you've got to get your denominator right, which means you have to figure out what the enterprise spend is.

Some of our category groups have been using the enterprise spend for their initiatives.

In terms of e-RFx, we've been using a tool for a number of RFIs and RFPs — mostly RFPs depending on the category and the use case. We work with the teams try to figure out what the needs are, where they need our support, whether we need to build the RFP on their behalf and facilitate it, or if they will build it and we will just monitor and help them out throughout the process.

We also work with suppliers who may be having issues. We're getting a little bit more strategic with that in 2020, building out a robust pipeline and timing, so that we can make sure that we have support in that area.

Sustainability is actually the next thing that we're going to be focusing on. That one's a little bit tougher, not from a tool perspective but from a data perspective, because there's a sense that having suppliers identify sustainable products will be a lot of work. Then we have to remap the data schema. A whole bunch of stuff that needs to happen, so that's an initiative for 2020.

SMART definitely saves us time when setting up an RFP, on the order of many hours. We have templates set up with our legal-approved terms, NDA, all of the language about the company, the code of conduct. We have our agreements attached to them as well. The team can take them and add in the information that's specific to the project and push things out. They don't need to build it out in Word. Technically, you could take a Word template and do that, but SMART helps with the facilitating of sending it to people. Recipients have to submit their intent to respond; we get that electronically. Before they can open the RFP we get them to sign off an NDA electronically, so there's a time saving there. Any supplier code of conduct or the like, they have to attest to and sign off on that electronically, so we save that step.

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.

The back-end is probably where we see the largest time savings and efficiencies. Sending out an RFP in a Word doc seems really easy. Email it to everybody. They will fill it out and send it back. But then it takes hours upon hours — and I know this from experience — to consolidate and normalize all those responses, trying to get them into a cohesive summary. That can take days' and possibly weeks' worth of work, depending on the size of the RFP. That can be done as soon as it comes back. It's summarized, it's normalized, and it makes the scoring process a lot easier. The setup in the back-end, in particular, is a huge time saver. It could save anywhere from five to 10 hours in a 30-day period.

SMART by GEP has also helped us with diversity spend management.

One of the situations that we had was that our company split in half. We had to work with GEP to clone everything that we have and split it out. So the other half of the company had their version of the GEP tools and we had our version. During that process, our sister company made significant changes to the spend module. Their leader, the VP of procurement, told me that he actually wasn't impressed with the toolset, particularly the spend tool from GEP, and he put it out to bid. As part of the proposal that came back, GEP came up as one of the top-tier candidates.

GEP came in. Tony Butler is an amazing dude. He's really revamped and reinvigorated the organization. He's our relationship manager and he serves us well. So, he got the team together and said, "Hey, how can we make this process better? What can we do"? He went in with ears open, listened, did a needs analysis, came back and said, "Okay, we hear where the issues are. We hear what you want to do. Here's how we can address it." They put a very comprehensive strategic plan together and implemented it. They were able to clean up and rationalize the data. They were able to reduce the cycle time from about 45 days to 14 days.

They were able to get down to level-four reporting, which is very detailed reporting. They didn't have that before. They were able to significantly reduce the number of reporting categories as well.

Now, our sister company is very happy with the data. I actually had a confidential conversation with the VP of procurement and he told me, "We were not happy with these guys and we put out the bid. They came in, they impressed us with their plan, they implemented the plan, and cleaned it up. We have great insights into our data. We have very detailed metrics, now, as a result of their efforts and their strategy." He was thrilled. In fact, they ended up buying more modules because of that. 

So I reached out to GEP and said, "Hey, let's share those best practices because our data is originally from the same source. We have a similar problem to the one that they had. Why don't we use it? Let's not reinvent the wheel. Why don't we employ some of those strategies on our spend?" We're doing that as we speak. I was able to get them in to our new VP of procurement and do that same presentation. We didn't put them out to bid. Now, we're going to talk about what they were able to do for our sister company; how they were able to rationalize and how they were able to save time. We're going to try to employ those same types of things to improve our data. That's a real story of how they were able to really turn things around. They almost lost the business but they turned it around.

In addition, we had an end-of-2019 wrap-up meeting, and 2020 strategy meetings, a couple of weeks ago. We had all of our directors and those above them creating strategies. The IT team, which rolled out the new SMART spend tool was just raving about how great the tool is and about the capabilities. Our spend management expert just couldn't say enough about how great that team was and how they were able to make all these changes quickly. He said that had helped them to really focus on different strategic initiatives for that area. So I can absolutely say it has impacted the organization in a positive way.

There are two university systems within our state. In the two systems together, we have a total of 35 campuses. We use GEP SMART as more of an upstream, front-end procurement software. We don't have a full P2P installed. We only use it to facilitate requests for quotes, requests for proposals, and requests for information. When the sourcing event is done, we leverage the GEP SMART contract module to store fully-executed contracts. 

We also leverage the supplier management module, but that is only to facilitate sourcing events. We don't use it as a full supply-relationship management tool.

We do use their spend to run analytical reports and for opportunity-finding. 

It is a SaaS solution for us.

We didn't have a single sourcing technology within the two university systems. With GEP SMART, we have that one sourcing technology. There's a huge process improvement. If one campus wants to send out an RFP to multiple suppliers for lab supplies, for instance, they can search for any sourcing events on lab supplies and see that we did a lab supply RFP six months ago. They can assume it's closed and ready. They can then check if a contract stemmed from that particular sourcing event. If there is one, then this particular location doesn't have to go through the same process all over again. Some such processes can be very lengthy and it's wasteful for them to do exactly same process again, qualifying the same supplier, and then finding out that we already have a contract in place.

GEP SMART gives people the visibility that we need. A second campus that needs to source for the same category, instead of focusing on the bidding process, can actually focus on implementing and working with a supplier and their stakeholders to make sure that they implement the contract properly. They are able to manage that category, as opposed to spending their time on the bidding process. That has been a huge process improvement for us.

In terms of the solution contributing to the digital transformation of our organization, being in higher education we're a little bit behind. A lot of things are done manually. We have a very strict contract code that is driven by the state. Where private companies are not obligated to follow that code, as a public entity we have to follow it. The technologies to mimic exactly how we do business didn't exist. RFPs would be put into an envelope and handed to suppliers who would come on campus to get them. Who does that these days? Now, all RFPs are digitized. They get stored in a central location and are available for people to search, rather than sitting in somebody else's filing cabinet.

Similarly for contracts, campuses have a big file cabinet containing them, with signatures. People had somebody physically sign those contracts. Now we have electronic signature functionality, so contracts are routed through approval flow, electronically signed, and then automatically stored in the contract module. It has been a huge transformation. It was a huge culture shock for a lot of us who have been here for 25 years and doing the same things all that time. There are still some people who are not as accepting of the change. Others say, "This is great. I don't have to keep a big file cabinet in my office. I can get rid of all of this." We still have something of a mixed group of people in our organization, but it has definitely transformed the way that we do business.

The digital transformation and people being able to search and the reduction in redundancy are all part of the efficiency and process improvement, from our perspective, and there's a huge benefit to it.

The solution definitely saves us time when setting up an RFP. Not everyone is going into GEP SMART to search right away, but at our current adoption rate, it is saving us about 60 to 65 percent of the time RFPs used to take.

We use it for everything from source to contract. We're not using any P2P, but we use it for all of our spend analysis, all our RFXs, managing and tracking savings, and we use the supplier database strictly for contract and other sourcing events. We also use the contract repository and have automatic notifications set up for 30, 60, 90, and 120 days for every contract.

The spend module is helpful because, while the way we used to do it didn't take a lot of time, we were waiting on data. We'd only get it a couple of times a year and there would usually be a pretty big lag in the data. It would be last year's. We didn't have very fresh data. Now, we get our spend refreshed every single month.

Another big area where it has improved our organization is contracts. We get automatic alerts about them and we're able to see every contract that's coming up. When we get a notification, 120 days in advance, we'll send a note to the owner of that contract or the signatory or the team that's involved and say, "Hey, this contract's coming up in a couple of months. What do you want to do? Do you want to continue it? Do you want to renew it? Do you want to go out to a competitive bid?" It's a good way to kick off those conversations.

A lot of times our stakeholders have no idea when contracts are actually coming up. The worst thing that can ever happen is that you have a contract that you want to get out of but it just renewed 30 days ago. It's then so much more of a pain to try to get out of it. 

It definitely helps our procurement process to be more efficient but it depends on how you define procurement process. It definitely helps streamline our internal processes for managing our projects, but we're not reusing the projects module and then actually putting in dates or timelines. But the way it works, on contracts and sourcing, we're able to see, during an RFP, who has participated or who is planning to participate, and the percentage of RFP completion.

When an RFP is due in a week and we're sitting at zero percent, we can make those calls and send those reminder emails. That's as opposed to sending out an RFP via Excel where all you can do is hope you get it back by the due date. In that scenario, if the due date comes up and you didn't receive anything, you send it to the vendor and they might say, "Oh, I never saw this," or whatever the excuse may be. We now have a little bit more transparency into what they have. We can see if they logged on to the system and if they spent some time in the RFP, which definitely helps keep things on track throughout the sourcing process.

The solution also helps us save time when setting up an RFP. We're able to templatize things. With templates, you have to be very careful to not miss something though, so that you're not bringing something in from an old RP where the language wasn't relevant and may confuse people. We typically try to build a lot of them mostly from scratch, but we can bring in questions or guidelines that are relevant.

We primarily use it so that we can do sourcing with suppliers. We're able to send out notices to our suppliers to say, "We have an RFP or an RFI or an RFQ that we want you to bid against." We use it to collect their input and evaluate what we're getting to decide which vendor we will use in the particular situation.

That process requires that we have both the sourcing module and the supplier management module. The supplier management module is where we keep track of our suppliers and we can communicate across the platform to the supplier in multiple ways. We can send information back or get information from them, rather than go through email.

The third module is the spend analysis module. That is where we're able to evaluate how much we spend on different vendors, both from a CapEx and an OpEx perspective, year over year. We're able to say, "This is how much we spent with vendor A in 2017, 2018, and 2019." We use that information both to see whether that spend is increasing or decreasing, and primarily, so that we have the ability to see those spends and determine whether we want to push more at a particular vendor or less.

We're also using it for auctions. We're able to send out information to all the vendors for a particular product and say, "You have X amount of time to respond, and we want to see who's got the lowest price." They can't see each others' bids, so they have to sharpen their pencils to be able to win.

Some of the reasons we went with a solution like this were 

• to keep everything in one place
• to have a tool that helps us facilitate sourcing 
• to facilitate some of the hard-to-do things when it comes to evaluations.

The sourcing module is a place we can always go to find all the information we submitted to a vendor and what they submitted back to us. We don't have to worry about, "Where is that file that we received?" We can then keep track of all the vendors that we use and we can determine which vendor has a better shot for us if we want to get some information really quickly. 

An easy example that we use this platform for is that we want to hire a person to augment our staff. We have six or eight vendors who would do that kind of work for us. We're able to send the requirements for that staff position to all of those vendors. We're usually looking for a contractor, not to hire. We're able to ship that out really quickly to the vendors. They read the requirement and respond back with the resume of someone they have available who fits the requirements. We're able to quickly get that information from them. It doesn't get lost in emails because someone on the team is monitoring the system. We do get emails, but we're monitoring the system to get this information as quickly as possible. It's really meaningful and effective in getting that information out to the vendors.

The time it saves is when you have already created several RFPs or RFQs or RFIs and you can leverage those templates for the next time you have requests. So you don't have to recreate everything from scratch. You can say, "Create an RFI and use X as a template," where you're picking something that has a similar approach. That's where there are time savings.

You can also evaluate the dollar responses very easily and quickly, and compare them to those of the other vendors. One vendor says they'll charge $10, another one is $15, and a third one is $25. You can evaluate all the vendors in terms of their costs and see them on the screen together. So some of the evaluation functionality is great for time-savings. It doesn't save you any time in reading the RFP or reading the proposals and the information that the vendor sends back. With those, if you have to read them, you have to read them.

We primarily use it for two things: as a purchase-order invoicing system and for reporting and spend management.

We're doing two-way matching for our invoices and purchase orders, and those invoices do not have to be reviewed by our AP function. That takes that workload off them. It saves them time, although it's hard to say how much at this point.

There is also a lot more visibility into purchase-order, invoice, and spend data. That allows us to compute things which are adding to our accruals process on our month-end, so we can be a lot more accurate on what is owed, what's been paid, etc. The spend function has helped our procurement organization identify likely areas in procurement where we can drive value.

The fact that GEP is a single, unified software platform for our whole organization certainly unifies the information in one place. Since it's cloud, we can fairly easily grant access to whomever we need to grant access, to be able to leverage that data. Similarly, we have a very wide and dispersed user forum for procure-to-pay and it's something that we can quickly give them access to, including our purchasing catalog, with very minimal training. It's very intuitive for them if they've ever ordered from the web.

In addition, the solution is one of the keystones for our digital transformation. We have a larger project where we're also moving our ERP to the cloud, and this has been cited as one of the key functions to enable that. SMART is very well integrated so any design that we have for procure-to-pay has to keep that in mind, as we integrate with our financial system. That's blueprinted as part of our program.

In terms of the efficiency of our procurement process, the key is the invoicing piece. Also, the ability to interface directly with our suppliers and have them invoice us directly gives them more access to what they need to submit their invoices, returns, and credit memos. And any changes in pricing are immediate, so they can send things directly to us or interface directly in SMART and make pricing changes when necessary. We can distribute those to our customers or our users very quickly.