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.
N/A
Ramp
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Ramp is a corporate card and spend management solution that helps companies of all sizes to accelerate growth without compromising on their finances. With a direct integration with the user's accounting solutions, Ramp helps finance teams save time tracking expenses, following up with employees, and closing their books. Ramp offers companies real time visibility into spending, automated expense reporting, and advanced insights into ways to cut spend.
N/A
Pricing
GEP SMART
Ramp
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GEP SMART
Ramp
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Ramp provides a free tier for smaller teams who want to simplify finances. A step-up to our free tier is Ramp Plus, starting at $15/month/user along with platform fees based on team size. Then, for large businesses, the Enterprise plan requires a custom quote.
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.
Ramp is well suited for managing everyday spending. We have been able to set standard permissions across the board for our team, monitor spending easily, and adjust "allowances" accordingly and quickly. The instant funding once a request is approved makes it so much faster to make a purchase, if outside of the set parameters. Ramp travel offerings are sometimes unattractive, and we have found many flights, hotels, and car rentals by going to other platforms or the suppliers directly. Pricing is comparable, but many times it is cheaper to book outside of Ramp.
Ramp syncs to Sage Intacct smoothly, pulling dimensions in directly from the ERP.
Coding rules within Ramp are easy to customize, allowing for logic-based options following the path of the GL. This use of smartlists for dimensions dramatically lowers the instances of human data entry error.
Approval routing rules are easy to create and change as the business changes. Approvals can be based on either the user or the coding of an individual transaction depending on your business needs.
The out-of-office delegation function allows the approval process to continue without delays when key personnel are away on vacation.
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.
Even more integration to have us spend less time on reporting expenses for grant reports
This does not happen often, but if you make a purchase and then cancel it with the vendor, for some reason, Ramp does not immediately recognize that purchase cancellation and will continue to remind you to submit a receipt or tag it as an accidental charge, but there is no option to tag it as a canceled purchase.
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.
For the most part, Ramp has been a massive benefit to our organization. It has an easy user experience, looks good on the screen, has intuitive workflows in most applications, and other than issues with accounting, coding & syncing I receive very little feedback (which is positive for us) on using Ramp.
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.
These solutions were all great in their own ways. The two main reasons we chose Ramp was because of their innovation around AI. They have implemented AI Agents in their tool to help enforce the company expense policy and help managers be more efficient in reviewing and approving their direct report expenses. Also, we are able to manage all of our company's international entities on one platform
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.
Ramp has definitely helped us save hundreds of dollars in just the first year of using it. Expenses can easily get lost in the shuffle that is fraudulent or placed on the wrong credit card, but with Ramp, the admin team can see everyone's spend and make call-outs to charges that don't look to be the accurate way in advance of it possibly getting lost and forgotten down the line.
