Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

Our client implemented the Oracle Human Capital Management part of the solution. With these features, they can:

• Rapidly implement jobs, positions, grades, and steps within setup of organizational structure.
• Measure and monitor performance for personal goals and corporate objectives.
• Define and manage workforce competence through the management of learning path, course completion, and learning certification.
• To do this before on paper basis, it was very time consuming. Now, they can use the gained time to properly manage their workforce.

Our client has not only implemented the Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) solution. They did also the integration with other solutions, such as the Work Management solution, so when there is a certain work order to be issued, they can easily and rapidly identify the proper available resources to perform the work.

More flexibility in configuration related to the Payroll module, in order to easily implement the local legislation.

We implemented this product for one of our clients. This client has used the solution since 2010. In 2015, they upgraded the solution from version 12.1.3 to version 12.2.4.

No.

No.

I would rate the level of the technical support as a seven out of 10. There are big delays in the issues of resolution times

Our client previously used an internally developed application. They switched because this application covered only a small part of their needs related to human capital management, and it was difficult to maintain due to the lack of IT specialized resources.

The initial setup was straightforward. Our team has a lot experience in the Oracle E-Business Suite implementation and we also cooperated with professionals from Oracle Romania. Lastly, the client was actively involved in all the stages of the project.

All pricing and licensing information is public and available for everybody. I advise others to check this information in advance in order to correctly decide what to ask to the vendor.

Our client evaluated other options from smaller and similar companies, as Oracle, but Oracle’s solution was suitable for them at the time in terms of features and possibilities for integration with other already existing solutions.

Be careful at the number and complexity of the reports needed to compare with the pre-defined reports. If the gap between the two is big, then they have to consider a bigger duration for the project and its corresponding additional price.

Easy in implementation.

Maybe the contract, which is too complicated.

Six years.

None, but some issues with the Java launching.

Sometimes, yes.

It is good.

No.

No, none at all. We did start with two products, but it was not perfect in terms of integration.

Oracle licencing is very complex, and the pricing is too expensive .

No, it was strategic to go with Oracle.

Oracle has a low risk in implementation against all other products.

The system is reliable and the backbone of financial and other core systems in many organizations worldwide.

It has improved our business processes.

• Interfaces (downstream and upstream)
• End user interface (UX design)
• Performance
• The EBS Design to some extent is still monolithic.
• Maintenance activities still require a lot downtime.

I have used the solution for five years.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Satisfactory.

Support on Unix platforms is good.

I used Oracle Applications 11.0.3. This was an upgrade (out of place) to 12c.

It is very complex as its tightly coupled with business processes and also involves a very large number of interfaces.

Vendor plus in-house.

As the brand name says, Enterprise Resource Planning, and that's all. It offers integration for all business areas in one database.

I would like to see improvement in the overall UI.

We have been using this for more than 20 years.

Technical support is fair.

Valuable features include expense management and the accounting suite of products.

It has improved our efficiency and time to market.

I would like to see more automation.

There were no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

We used a home-grown solution.

The setup was moderate.

We implemented through an SI.

The ROI has yet to be calculated.

Be careful.

We evaluated SAP.

It is better to work out the requirements properly and minimize the customizations.

It's quite secure and fast, and we get an end-to-end solution.

Whenever you are growing, you get new products on the database server level, application server level and software. It definitely grows as your needs increase.

They started on the mobile app and tablets, but still I see there are no short-forms used in EBS, which are not I’m seeing coming on the tablet. Maybe increasing that will help because now everyone carries their tablets and handheld devices. You don’t need to go back to your seat and do anything if you are in the store or anything: warehouse.

You don’t need to spend time going back from there, you can solve the issue.

I’ve been using it for the past 13 years (approximately).

I started using Oracle applications from around 2003, from version 11.9 onwards. I have done some work on 10.7 as well, and from there, onwards.

It’s quite stable. Wherever you have issues you can get some patches on a one-off. We have CPU half-yearly and all those kind of things that makes it like whatever known issues, you can get rid of those beforehand.

No.

Overall, support is good. Earlier, we used to have MetaLink, now we have support with Oracle.com. We can pay the Support Representative or we can find so many documents and all that, but still there is a thing if you need anything development related, then SRs and getting solution may take up to years of time. That is a kind of thing I’d like to get rid of.

If a person is knowledgeable, it’s good enough.

Definitely I’d say data and different application, new servers and 12c and Database, all these have very cool features and In-Memory and EBR.

They should use these things more to get the most out of the solution.

Primarily, performance and responsiveness, and also, good support.

I'm basically an administrator, so I don't know much about the business functionality, but I feel it's a very cool technology to manage the financials, payroll, manufacturing units, et cetera.

I don't think so. As far as I know, it's doing its best in pretty much all the areas. As of now, I can't tell anything.

For the past six years I've been working as an administrator for Oracle E-Business Suite.

I believe it's pretty stable. I think it's one of the best ERPs available as of today.

I think they're pretty responsive.

Basically, most of the time, usually we go through the normal process of creating a service request, and at times, if there is a major issue or any critical problem, they would step in and they personally help out the customer.

I would definitely encourage anybody to start using the E-Business Suite as an ERP solution. I think most of the companies are using it. Oracle applications are so popular that many customers are already using it.

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.