In the course of our work for and discussions with large procurement departments this year, GEP’s name is coming up much more frequently than just a few years ago. Impressively, the solutions and services being provided by GEP in these discussions are quite broad, be it managed services, outsourcing, or solutions like spend analysis. They’ve also won one of the deals we were involved in and are currently on the short-list for several P2P & Sourcing software deals that we’re tracking. We recently spoke to GEP’s Mita Gupta, vice president of global business development and Al Girardi, vice president of global marketing and got the chance to get a mid-year update and discuss the products and services that GEP uses to serve its global client base. What follows today is the second of our three-part analysis.
GEP’s Worldwide Reach and Local Focus
Procurement teams know all too well that their work requires a particular set of skills (click here to read our recent Skills for the Modern Procurement Pro series). These talents are often secured over long experience and training; but, more often then not, procurement departments struggle to develop these skills and, whne they do, they often find themselves spending too much time on the less important, more tactical ones. In both situations, this is where a company like GEP and its broad portfolio of services and technologies comes in.
In part one of this series, we discussed GEP’s Products and Services mix and detailed why their SMART by GEP solution matters in its evolution and expansion as a provider of solutions and services. This time around, we’ll touch on the company’s growth plans and recent announcements.
Worldwide Reach with a Local Flavor
GEP today has approximately 1,100 employees worldwide in 10 different locations. These include two headquarters locations in Clark, N.J., and Mumbai, India, as well as local and regional service centers across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. With its spread of consultants and technology professionals, GEP is able to leverage local expertise to conduct on-site consultant visits or provide onsite outsourcing staff as needed while supporting numerous languages worldwide.
According to Mita Gupta, with its outsourcing work, GEP tries to leverage its lower-cost areas, such as Mumbai and Prague, where possible and then to work with their clients to build out a staffing plan that has the right cultural fit with each client organization.With its other services, GEP can leverage the staff in its global locations to customize the onsite/offsite staffing model and provide local language support where needed.
Big Wins Against Big Players
According to GEP, its geographic coverage was seen as particularly useful for the large multinationals like Bristol-Myers Squibb and BASF that have multiple locations worldwide and have both recently signed deals with GEP. Al Girardi also noted deals with other Fortune 50 companies in the past 12 months including General Motors, Kimberly-Clark, and Glaxo SmithKline among many others.
In the case of Kimberly-Clark, GEP displaced Procurian, Kimberly-Clark’s longstanding procurement services provider. This is just the most recent in a series of major wins for GEP, which says it has beaten out IBM and/or Accenture for four of the last five major services wins that GEP has had this past year. GEP has also just landed a contract with Honda, in another highly competitive bid.
Looking to the Future
On the services side, GEP’ has always considered its core strength to be in manufacturing and the CPG space, but Gupta notes that there’s been increased interest in procurement outsourcing among financial services firms and pharmaceuticals since the 2007/2008 recession and that GEP’s industry expertise is now quite expansive.
One key development on the services sides is a the market intelligence service that GEP plans to develop that builds upon its current capabilities in this arena. They expect that the new team will eventually operates as a standalone team. The goal is to provide off-the-shelf market intelligence reporting, such as supply market analysis and category research, as well as the capability to provide one-off reports as requested. Gupta said their overall plan for market intelligence won’t be based initially upon one type of revenue model (i.e. subscription, pay per usage, etc.) but that GEP will utilize several different approaches to ultimately determine how it delivers (and sells) its market intelligence.
Unlike many business process outsourcing organizations currently competing in the procurement space, GEP has remained focused on the supply management industry for its entire 14-year lifetime. As a result of this, they’ve been able to develop a unique expertise that can support a wide range of services; their focus and expertise has also been critical in the development of its solution suite. And, with their recent big ticket wins on both the software and services sides, we expect GEP to be a strong market force for years to come.
RELATED ARTICLES
GEP: Differentiating Itself with a Broad (& Strong) Portfolio (Part 1)
GEP Gets SMART with Its Solution Suite (Part 1)
GEP Gets SMART with Its Solution Suite (Part 2)
The Integrated Sourcing Suite: What It Is & Who Provides It
Future Shock: Disruptive Technologies on Procurement’s Horizon
