GEP SMART is a procurement platform, meant as an end-to-end unified procurement solution that provides synergy between finance and purchasing and process fluidity.
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Zip Intake-to-Procure
Score 7.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Zip provides a place for employees to initiate a purchase or vendor request. Each request is routed for approval across procurement, finance, IT, data security, legal, and other teams, and Zip integrates into ERP and P2P solutions to create a PR or draft PO. The vendor states Zip works with Canva, Checkr, Hopin, Zapier, CM Group, and other companies both public and private.
GEP SMART is well suited to equip procurement professionals to manage multiple RFx's at one point in time and help provide structure to the process. If an organization has an existing ERP and they want to acquire GEP SMART as a bolt-on, then integration is key. If there is any customization then it is more difficult to take advantage of the latest upgrades.
Zip is a newer product in the P2P space, and as such there are still some areas for improvement. They don't have all the "bells and whistles" products and configurations that some of the other players in this space have, but the products they do offer are best in class. Zip is an ideal tool for tactical procurement.
Our organization has yet to take advantage of upgrading to the latest version of GEP SMART. The version that we are on does not make use of the full screen for the different internal windows and pop-up windows. I find it cumbersome to scroll left-right and up-down on the smaller windows when there is much real-estate on the screen that could optimize the user interface.
GEP SMART provides technical support but our vendors seem to have some difficulty logging in to their profiles and updating their information. Occasionally, the salesperson delegates to another internal member so we'll have to set up the new member with their log in.
The digital signature process requires that the signers of the agreement be defined before the agreement is routed for approval. Sometimes our vendors have a pool of signers that could sign the agreements and it can become a small challenge to change the signers after it has already been defined in GEP SMART.
Missing the ability to proxy as another user. Currently, if one approver did not set up their delegation, an admin or the approver of that step must reassign each of the approvals to another person.
Bulk upload options for admins to update queues and subqueues.
Missing ability to schedule reports or the option to share a saved view with another user. It would be easier if certain filtered views can be shared with others to avoid each user having to create their own views.
The tool is fantastic, but we are investigating a broader spend management solution at the moment which may mean we look in a different direction for this capability, most likely internally developed.
The application is highly usable, but there are some parts of the design that could be improved such as the layout and scaling on the pages, the amount of unused white space within the interface, and the consistency of the interface between modules.
The performance of the GEP SMART platform overall has been excellent. We do not hear complaints about system performance and have not experienced any slowdowns in adjacent systems due to the GEP implementation. Of all the (largely self-inflicted) change management challenges we've dealt with, system performance and platform reliability have not been on the list of concerns.
The support team is responsive, smart, and knowledgeable about their product and about our business needs. They are also flexible to respond to questions and find solutions to our requirements.
Although we had encountered many bugs, GEP was able to address them quickly, and sent a technical person to sit in our hands-on training sessions to address bugs efficiently
We selected GEP SMART for its ability to offer a full end-to-end integrated source-to-pay solution, pricing, and ease of use. There was an implementation series offered by GEP, as well as flexibility, customization, account management team dedication, and the overall service and support.
Truth be told, we haven’t seen any other similar products. The alternative was manually tracking in Google Sheets, ticketing systems, and in NetSuite. Coupa was probably the closest in terms of what we were looking for but they were not willing to fit it to our needs like Zip was able to.
GEP SMART has improved our spend analytics speed by allowing analysis to be completed in minutes compared to days when we previously used Excel spreadsheets.
The SMART Sourcing (RFX) solution has greatly improved the consistency of our supplier quoting and information gathering process.
Zip Intake-to-Procure has helped clean up forecasting for us - we've improved accuracy by over 30% since now we're forcing folks to make sure spend is captured accurately and checking submitted PO amounts against the bottoms up forecast
We've also been able to leverage the SLA insights provided by Zip Intake-to-Procure to increase operational efficiencies. We're identified orgs that are slowing down the overall approval process and putting more pressure with shorter SLA times.
