Most Comprehensive GEP SMART S2C Review by Public Higher Education System.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
SMART by GEP (S2C) is used by all procurement professionals at my company in order to facilitate sourcing events, and author/store contracts once executed. This resolves visibility issues we have as we don't have a single instance of backend systems such as P2P or ERP so having a single instance of S2C helps to search for sourcing events and fully executed procurement contracts across all locations.
Pros
- SMART is flexible and scalable.
- The account team is there to listen client concerns and business needs.
- The engineering team is willing to share their concepts in development and vet with their clients prior to production release. They value client feedback.
- GEP has a lot of progressive thinkers and is willing to invest in new technology trends such as AI, Machine Learning, digital adoption, etc.
Cons
- SMART tends to be too client-focused. This can be a strength while too client-focused approach would not work well as GEP is gaining diverse clients from different verticals. Some functionality was developed for a specific client and it was pushed to production for general clients to use. At the time, SMART was missing some basic functionality and the engineering team was too busy to react to specific enhancement requests from a small pool of clients that it didn't have time to work on basic functionality.
- Generally speaking, SMART is easy to use, but it needs to improve its UI. Some icons are hard to see (web accessibility issues) and not logically placed. Their placement of icons or action menus is not intuitive and will need to be enhanced. I expect GEP to hire professional UX/UI experts to revamp their UX similar to more prevalent apps out there as many users are used to performing certain actions in an app in a certain way. For example, in terms of search functionality, many users are used to how Google search results were displayed and returned. I understand that searching is not GEP's core competency, but users are expecting search functionality to behave like Google search as that is what they are used to. Highly recommend GEP to leverage best practices, market trends, end-user behavioral analysis, etc. when developing logic for functionality.
- SMART user guides and release notes will have to be revamped. Oftentimes, their user guides and release notes are not available, or poorly put together with typos. This is an area GEP will have to invest in and bring a technical writer to develop step by step user guides and release notes (before and after screenshots would be much appreciated) to help those who manage SMART so administrators have a clear understanding of logic and how-to prior to new functionality introduction.
Return on Investment
- It helps users to better project manage their sourcing events and contract negotiations.
- Gained visibility across different locations is definitely a positive thing.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
JAGGAER (formerly SciQuest), SAP Ariba Procurement and Corcentric Source-to-Pay Platform (Determine / Selectica)
Other Software Used
Oracle Cloud HCM, Snagit, Microsoft 365 Business Premium
