Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

I implement the solution for customers in Saudi Arabia who prefer on-premises solutions.

E-Business Suite is an on-premises solution but you have the option to deploy its infrastructure as a service. For example, we have already implemented Amazon, Google, and Oracle on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. With the infrastructure, you don't need to have your own data center but you need to have ownership of your database and more. You have options with the solution. You can install it on-premises, host it elsewhere, or place it in a cloud solution like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a service. 

The on-premises solution has maturity in features but also flex fields. If you have ownership of a database, you can fully customize and personalize the solution. 

This differs from a public cloud where you are limited in customization such as adding tables or integrating with a third party. 

Improvements could be made in mobility for mobile applications or tablets. The solution still has some web-built pages and Java forms, and Oracle is currently shifting Java forms to be web-based. Once that is complete, Oracle will be accessible from mobile applications and tablets. This is a main difference and strong benefit in comparison to cloud-based solutions like Oracle Fusion. 

I'd like the addition of modern merges and an integration with social media like LinkedIn. 

Minor enhancements in function are sometimes requested and should be implemented. 

I have been using the solution for nine years on and off. 

The solution is very stable. It was created in 1980 and there's a pool of consultants very experienced in working with it so they don't even need to contact support for issues. There are 40 years of knowledge behind it and all issues are known. 

The solution is scalable. 

Customer support is based on the awareness of the person who contacts Oracle. Service requests sometimes loop because Oracle supports the solution at the product level, not the functional level. The product level is any item related to the product itself. The functional level includes change requests or maintenance for the product.  

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward and simple. For maintenance, two consultants might be needed to address any issues. 

I am a member of the Oracle Implementation Team and implement the solution for customers. 

One of the major issues is that the solution has a high price. 

We evaluate options to determine the best solution for customers based on scope of work. We determine the type of business, requirements, architecture, and streamlining needs. For small to medium companies, we generally recommend Oracle. 

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

The integration of the various modules is definitely the most valuable feature for us. Our clients being business-minded, which involves customers and suppliers. 

We pay bills and look to Oracle primarily for products which can integrate into our existing systems.

Due to the integration, we can just access just one software for AP, GL, PO, AR, and everything just integrates together. It has helped us to reduce data entry, because we can just enter data once and it is accessible from the other modules. It certainly reduces human intervention, which in turn saves time and, ultimately, money.

The issue of frequently applying patches and updates to fix bugs. Oracle should improve upon this issue, especially since it happens too frequently.

For Oracle R12.1.3, we have used it for a considerable length of time in most of the projects we support. We also have used other products, which are 12.2.4 and 12.2.5 for the last three years.

This product could be stable if there was a good support team supporting it. If there is a team of experts supporting it, you are guaranteed of its stability. Sometimes it becomes unstable, then a good support team jumps into it and makes it stable again.

It has been able to scale for our needs.

The support at Oracle is good. It is not very good, but okay. The Oracle support is through the Oracle MetaLink, where you open up the Oracle SR, then get the support needed. For this, we spend at least a day or two providing them with information and it is time consuming. Hence, I think it is okay. However, in case of any urgency, we need to go to the escalation route for any urgent support that is needed and need to go over the issue with them. We struggle in terms of getting the right support.

We used Oracle Applications 11i. The reason for switching is because we opted for the new release of r12, which had more advantageous features.

Initial setup really depends on the module. It is not very consistent, because different people have developed the different modules. You have to get used to it.

Oracle scales the pricing, but E-Business Suite is still very expensive for small to mid-sized businesses.

From the beginning, we were only using Oracle. It is not a small product; it is a big company. Going from Oracle to another vendor would be very costly. That's why they are not thinking about it. Maybe for the next five to 10 years, my company will be using only Oracle, but I am not completely sure.

Make sure that you have a very solid project management plan prior to implementing it. 

Be sure to assess your timeline, duration, and everything else that is relevant to a successful implementation and actually using the products. It really helps if you have a solid performance assessment done prior to starting the implementation.

The most valuable features are straight-through processing because we need to make sure that we have a good end-to-end process. The biggest thing that we also look for is the ability to easily research invoices, where you can attach to the specific invoice line item the detailed payments, etc. We look at it as our biggest factor.

It's important that we can constantly be able to monitor what we've spent relative to the government's money. We always make sure that we have everything in proper order since it is not our physical money. It is somebody else's.

We are an integrated contractor, which basically means that we are contracted by the United States government to operate a program specific to their needs, and to ensure that the program is spending their money correctly, and to make sure that we come in on-budget or even under-budget for the government. We would definitely need to ensure that whatever we do is very much in line with all of the government polices and regulations. We need to ensure that a software that we utilize adheres to that.

The biggest thing that we utilize EBS for is mainly Finance and HRMS. Those are our two biggest modules that we utilize within EBS. So we want to make sure that whatever we are utilizing it for will be easy for the employee to gain access to say, their HR data, or for our acquisition management department to be able to see where the invoice stands in the process of being paid. Those are just a couple of examples.

It is still a little outdated as far as what we consider a twenty-first century software. You're still using Oracle forms, that sort of thing. Payables is a prime example: there's the web interface and then the forms interface and we hate having to switch between the two areas. To create a simple report, at least in my opinion, sometimes requires a developer versus just me, as the user, going in and doing what I need to do. It's extremely difficult to do some data mining on a whim. If there's something repetitive in nature, then we can set it up with a developer, it works, but in our opinion we know that things could work better than the way they are currently.

We've really had no issues with deployment.

The current version that we're on, which is 12.2.4, is decently stable. However, the problem is that the system doesn't allow for us to have a lot of users on it. The hardware that we have is able to run beautifully when there's not a lot of people on. I equate it to, 'The machine's a Ferrari, you can't tow a boat with a Ferrari.' Essentially, the system will go fast when it's allowed to go fast, without the bogging down of users, but that's one of our problems right now. It seems to be that multiple users on the system have caused a lot of back-log.

So far, it seems like we can do a lot of things with EBS relative to customizations. We don't seem to have any real restriction in that area. But some things like, me as the cash manager, setting up banks tends to be a lot more cumbersome than it should be. There seems to be a lot more involvement with doing those types of basic things than they should be in the real-world sense. It seems to be a little bit more like it was geared towards a developer to set up the bank rather than a professional.

Since I'm not the support side of things in the organization, I don't directly deal with technical support, but there are people, such as DBAs and developers, who have been in talks with Oracle about some of the issues. They didn't seem like they had any real problems other than some of the solutions are a little slow to come about. It could be because our organization is very unique, some of the solutions that might need to happen could be a little bit more involved with trying to develop a solution that we need. I don't think we've had a situation, however, where we weren't able to get the needed support.

I wasn't actually at the company at the time, but for upgrades for which I've been apart, they did seem to be a little bit more difficult. A lot of it could be on our end, mainly because of how we do a lot of customizations. We had to do these customizations, unfortunately, because E-Business Suite didn't allow for a specific industry like ours to have more to an 'out-of-the-box'-type of developed software. There was a lot of customization. Now, they have improved from version to version, but for our business, we're still very much away from being cloud-based. Our software sits on a non-internet network. It really is hard for us as an organization to sometimes do business in the environment of, 'Everyone wants to move to an internet system', i.e. the cloud. There are organizations such as ours that have trouble at this point being on an internet-based system.

With our customizations, it stopped a lot of the upgrade that we just had last year. When we did the upgrade, a lot of these customizations were a constant battle where one would not work, another would work, and then when you'd fix one, something else would happen. There were a lot of issues, which we are, as an organization, trying to pull away from customizations. Oracle has not really been geared a lot towards what our line of business was. We have to do a lot of customizations in order to allow for that software to work as we need.

Minimize your customizations if you can. If not, get a lot of training because a lot of the screens are not as intuitive. I'm kind of a rare breed, I guess, as I do have some 'IT sense', so I can maneuver through screens, but when it comes to other people in my group who are really not 'IT minded' at all, they're usually asking me for help when there are some set-ups in their own modules. Setting up is the biggest key, and if you mess that up it's going to propagate the rest of your EBS experience, so you need to have a proper set-up.

Oracle E-Business Suite is a financial and accounting reporting tool that we use for accounts payable, creating invoices, and accounts receivable. We process a lot of transactions, so the greatest benefit is that all manual activities are being automated. We don't have to spend hours to generate invoices and accounting reports. All the manual insurance processes have been automated, making it easy for the business to handle day-to-day business activities.

I think the standard reports in the AR and the GM modules need improvement. I would like to see a few new reports, including customized reports and summaries.

We have been using Oracle for almost five years.

Oracle E-Business Suite is quite stable. We did have some challenges when we when we started, but now it is more or less stable. The system was not initially optimized to find the transaction database. When we upgraded our systems in May, it took almost two to three months before our Oracle E-Business Suite implementation matched the business systems. Now everything is working smoothly.

We use technical support very often. We open service requests, and if the ticket level is a seven, we see a good response. They need to improve on their turnaround time on the Sev 2 and Sev 3 service requests.

We used to be PeopleSoft, which was a financial system, and it was not meeting all our business requirements, and was not scalable. That's why we switched to Oracle. Additionally, Oracle is more compatible with PeopleSoft than SAP.

When we introduced Oracle E-Business Suite, I was part of the implementation team. We used to be PeopleSoft, so I was part of the PeopleSoft internal auditing team, and I was also involved with the upgrade. The new implementation was very challenging because we needed to do a lot of customization. There were also many new business requirements at that point in time. But, when we later performed an upgrade, it was not too complex.

We did evaluate SAP, but found Oracle to be more compatible with our financial systems.

Our most important criteria is that the applications be more customer centered, and that manual activities are automated.

Oracle E-Business Suite is a very awesome product. It has a lot of capabilities, and you can gain a lot of business knowledge through it.

For us, the Finance module is the most valuable piece of E-Business Suite.

With the Finance module, we can manage our finance organization from a single system for accounting purposes. This is important to ensure that we have consistent financial information across our organization.

I'd like to see Oracle continue to optimize it by making it faster. The functionalities are pretty good as-is, but they just need to make it function faster.

I've been working with it for about two years. The installation I'm working on has been around for 10 years roughly.

We have no issues with deploying it.

We haven't had any issues with crashing or downtimes or anything due to the product. It's been pretty stable, in our experience.

I believe it is scalable. I think it is one of the industry leaders for financials. Currently, we are roughly about a terabyte of data using it and have had no problems scaling it for our needs.

We've found that technical support has been challenging as they are not always the most forthcoming with information nor are they the most highly-trained techs when you open SRs. There have definitely been issues there, especially compared to the costs that you pay for the support.

There's always room for improvement, but we're overall happy with it.

The integration of all the various modules is definitely the most valuable feature for us. We're a business outfit, so we have customers, we pay bills, and we look to Oracle primarily for products that can integrate into our existing system. If it doesn't, we look at something else, but we always start with Oracle first.

We use the billing module heavily. In fact, one of the things I was looking for were some of the new features in 12.2.4, which which include federal billing features. That's really going to be helpful for us and that's what we're upgrading to right now because we've had to have customizations before. We're hoping that the inherent functionality that we'll be upgrading to will allow us to drop some of our customizations. We try to keep our Oracle as vanilla as possible, so having those enhanced features is something that we're really looking forward to.

For simplicity's sake, we like to cut down on the number of interfaces that we need. It makes upgrading easier because of the integration and it helps me to oversee things from a functional perspective. We are doing an upgrade right now, but it also makes it easier to plan for your upgrades and to follow through on those plans.

We have project contracts for government customers, and that has been a little bit tougher to implement, because I don't think Oracle has a lot of clients on that. We implemented that about two or three years ago, but we haven't found a lot of people who are using it. What I'd like to see is not necessarily something in the functionality of the software, but rather a way to meet some of the other customers who are using the product, which would be helpful.

Also, we would like to do more with iExpense. We use iExpense right now for purchasing cards, but we do not use it for employee vouchers. I think we cannot use it two ways at the same time. We're using it right now for the purchasing cards, but we don't use it for employee vouchers. I think we would like to have more functionality in that area.

We've had it for twenty years, so it predates my tenure there. We're really simple; we are one legal entity, one operating unit, one ledger. We are embarking right now on implementing Multi-Currency as we do have some international business. We probably are going to do more with multi-org in the future, but we haven't started that yet. It's called Multi-Org, but it's not a module, it's just functionality. For example, we right now have one legal entity in the US. We just opened our office in Singapore, so if we have a need to establish a separate set of books for them, then that would be Multi-Org and we'd set up a new set of books for Singapore. But right now have everything in one US ledger.

I've been there six years and the only big thing we've really implemented is Project Contracts. Actually, we did hire an outside consultant, because that product is quite specialized. I don't recall there being any big issues with deploying that.

It's very stable. There's a little bit of bugginess in the billing area, but generally, because we've had it for so long, we've worked out a lot of our issues.

I think we still have enterprise licensing, for the most part, so it's easy to scale.

For one thing, we do a lot of work with the federal government, but the federal government isn't the federal government. It depends on which piece of the federal government you work with. Each of your customers in the government have different requirements and you really do have to do some customizations around billing. Because we have all these different federal government customers, some of them want the bills uploaded into a certain system that they have to process their bills, or they want the bills to be in a certain format and your other government customers don't need it in that format. We do a lot of things based on the customers’ needs, but I think the functionality in this next release is taking some of those considerations and putting them in the software, so they're there already. So the 10-34's and 10-35's that the government requires, their putting that into the Oracle functionality, whereas before we had to make those on our own.

It takes us a while, but we do things very methodically. We have not typically had outside consultants and we typically do our own upgrades. I think that that's a good thing.

I would advise potential user that, if they're implementing from scratch, to really, really learn the product before they implement. Oracle is known for certain decisions you make where you come to a point to either turn right or left, and if you turn right you can't decide later to turn left. I think some people try to slam things in and take short cuts, but I've done implementations in two different companies, and I've found that doing the slow and methodical approach and really planning it out is the best way to go.

We've run our business on it for 15 years now. It's provided us good functionality, good flexibility, so if we need to extend it or modify it, it's fairly easy to do, and those changes are persistent.

It's been very useful over the years and Oracle's fairly responsive to requests for changes. It takes a while for them to get through, because it takes a lot to get those processes reviewed through Oracle. It's been a good partnership for us over the years.

I'd like to see more mobile applications, though I know they're working on that. It also needs simpler setups and simpler management tools. Currently the setup of mobile and some newer areas is not simple.

We've been using it since 1999.

Deployment is not simple, particular with mobile applications.

It has been a very stable product. We've pretty much taken all of the recommendations that Oracle provides. We do a multi-node implementation, so we've spread it out over multiple servers so that we don't have very many performance issues. Most of the performance issues we've had are related to IO, so that's a hardware issue and not software. Again, when we do have performance issues, it's always been working in SR with Oracle and they've been very responsive.

It's very easy to scale E-Business Suite as we need more servers. We can add them and take them away as needed. During year-end, we always need more horsepower, so we just add more servers and we can take them away afterwards.

They're always hiring new people, so if you get a new person, it's somewhat chancy on getting good support, but they generally have excellent people. Eventually you can get to somebody who's excellent, especially if your problem is a challenging one. It's easy to escalate it and get it up there.

I've always thought working with Oracle support has been much better than any other vendor we've worked with. They're always improving their website and making it more helpful. I've been very pleased with their support.

The most valuable feature for us is integrity in the sense that the General Ledger module is directed connected with our payables. And our Human Resources is connected with payroll, so it's one unit from HR's perspective, which is very efficient. Also now, we have the iRecruitment module, so it's a single continuum from HR to finance. We don't have to deal with different software.

Another important aspect for us is safety in the marketplace. We know it's not going to go away and that our investment in the solution is OK.

I mainly support human capital solutions, so the biggest benefit for me has been with the iRecruitment module that took very paper-driven tasks to just a few clicks. It's saved me a lot of time and provided connections between tons of separate interfaces.

iRecruitment is, however, a very weak module that gets a lot of user complaints. And even though we get good responses from Oracle Support, it's really clunky and is one of the weakest module that I think Oracle has.

We also didn't like the Time and Labor module. We replaced it with Chronos, and that's made a big difference.

I've been using it since 1999. Back then, we used only basic applications such as Payables/Receivables, Ledger Projects, HR, and payroll. We went with iProcurement in 2005 and then iRecruitment in 2006.

The issues with deployment depend on which modules are deployed as well.

We've had no issues with instability.

We've been able to scale for our needs.

The TARs assigned to us have improved a lot over the years. They have a lot of scripts that can be registered as concurrent. Previously in 1999, I'd have to think twice before logging a ticket because it was a back-and-forth nightmare. Now we can chat online very quickly.

As a developer, I have no power or decision in the selection process. But I think it was market presence and the stability that won over management. We purchased PeopleSoft before Oracle acquired them, and after they did, our whole organization uses Oracle now.

I think that the initial setup is complex, especially since we were unfamiliar with the software. We were talking to consultants who were unable to relate to us. We were coming from a mainframe world and a lot of our decisions were wrong. I don't fault Oracle for that, though. It's just part of any implementation.

Getting the right consultant is key, and sometimes rapid implementation doesn't pay.

I'm an Oracle die-hard, but I think that iRecruitment and Time & Labor are very weak.