We performed a comparison between GEP SMART and SAP Ariba Procurement based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP, Oracle, GEP Worldwide and others in Procurement Software."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."
"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..."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"I like the guided buying features."
"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."
"Ariba allows us to manage our suppliers seamlessly."
"It is a stable solution."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 want to see continued investment in analytics and reporting."
"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 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."
"They should make the solution more user-friendly."
"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 the solution to be more automatic."
"SAP could make it easier for people to become SAP Ariba consultants within the SAP ecosystem."
"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."
Earn 20 points
GEP SMART is ranked 4th in Procurement Software while SAP Ariba Procurement is ranked 1st in Procurement Software with 8 reviews. GEP SMART is rated 8.4, while SAP Ariba Procurement is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of GEP SMART writes "Provides us with more frequent, fresh spend data and alerts us about contract renewals". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP Ariba Procurement writes "Easy to use but lacks advanced features". GEP SMART is most compared with Zycus Source to Pay Suite and Coupa Procure, whereas SAP Ariba Procurement is most compared with SAP Fieldglass, Oracle Procurement Cloud, Oracle E-Business Suite iProcurement, Zycus Source to Pay Suite and Coupa Procure.
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