Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

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.

It provides a great SLA model. Also, with all the different modules that are available, the technology stack is very good.

We do a lot of inter-company transactions, and Oracle has limitations on inter-company transactions. We would like Oracle to have inter-company transactions for more than four inter-companies, or more than five, multiple inter-companies.

We've been using it for about 15 years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We are on an slightly older version as we don't apply as many patches as Oracle recommends because we feel it's not stable. So we've definitely had some stability issues that have prevented us from moving forward for the product.

We're able to scale it for our needs.

Technical support is very knowledgeable. I think normally the Metalink support is very good and sometimes we may have to reach out to them.

The complexity of the setup depends on whether you have a lot of requirements and are using many modules. It can be as simple or complex as you make it.

If you have a small shop, Oracle can accommodate. If you're a big shop, Oracle can do that, too. So Oracle is a solution for every kind of business. That's what I really like about E-Business Suite.

The integrations make it convenient for users as they only have one software package to take care of all their processes. I think that's important from a support perspective because it's like just one piece of software and we don't have to deal with different vendors. Support-wise, you don't want to talk to so many systems which interface between one vendor and another. If it's internally integrated, that saves us a lot of travel. A lot of times another problem happens during interface. Now we don't have to worry about those things with E-Business Suite and the full integrations of all the component modules.

It saves on cost, time, people, and human resources. It's just a very efficient solution for us.

We have some real difficulties with upgrades. Every time we perform an upgrade, we put a lot of effort into it. We perform a lot of testing, we bring in outside help, and then afterwards there's a lot of maintenance within the first few months of each upgrade.

Once we get past the difficulties and complexities of the upgrades, it deploys fine. We don't have any big issues with deployment after that.

It's a very stable product. We don't have issues with instability.

We see scalability issues when we use the Financial Statement Generator. We're in the process of moving to version 12.4, but we've had a lot of issues with FSG. With our data growing, we've seen performance deteriorating quickly. Some of the reports takes hours to generate, which, to me, is a scalability issue. We're hoping that the newer version resolves the issue, but that's yet to be seen.

Technical support is pretty good most of the time. Sometimes, though, I feel that they're throwing me the standard questions just to try and delay. I think those questions are unnecessary.

I do the setups in production, and afterwards, I'll do the support. It can be complex.

For me, technology-wise, it's great, and I would recommend it.

We find the most value in the fact that all the modules within E-Business Suit are fully integrated into one solution. It's one place where the entire company can have access to information and functions. This is the main benefit of the product.

The business has all the process integrated, so if you have it in different places it would be crazy trying to do a consolidation or a financial statement or reporting for the business to have all the activity in there.

Although all the modules are integrated with each other into E-Business Suite, sometimes when you apply one patch for Accounts Receivable, for example, it can damage Accounts Payable. That's why it's important to read the ReadMe that says that touching one module will impact another. But that was highly unexpected for us. We're constantly performing patches, and it's become an area of unreliability for our business. We can't know for certain whether what we're doing with one module won't negatively affect another.

I've been working here for thirteen years and we use all the financials modules, plus Property Manager. The financials modules we use are Procurement, Purchasing, General Ledger, Projects, Fixed Assets, Payables, and Receivables.

The implementation was fine. We would have loved to have something like SAP where you just perform the configuration in one instance and you can just put it back into a new instance so that you don't have to configure it again or use another application for that. But otherwise, E-Business Suite is a good tool.

I refer back to the issues when patching one module will affect another module. It's stable, otherwise.

It's scaled well for our needs.

Oracle will always have little bugs here and there. Fortunately, we have a very strong relationship with them, so whenever we had a service request that wasn't moving, we escalated it quickly. So we're OK in that regard.

I do find that sometimes first-level support doesn't know a lot and they ask the "classic" questions. Starting at level two, though, the support gets much better.

I haven't done a setup in the U.S., but I've done them in three Latin American countries. The business analysts are the implementation team and then we do the setups for the test instances. And then we go to our support team to do the configuration for UATs in Prague.

Sometimes we take advantage of all the things that Oracle gives you to go beyond just the basic stuff. We get a little creative so that there's a little more complexity to the setup in the end.

I worked as a contractor for Oracle for some years, and E-Business Suit is a very good tool. You will not find an ERP that doesn't give you challenges. The very first thing, even EBS or any ERP, is that you need to be clear on your processes and you have to clean them up first. Else, you're just going to put more garbage in the system and the system is so powerful that it's going to spit everywhere. It's the processes plus the data. If you can do data cleaning before or during the implementation, it will give you much more peace later on.

The most valuable feature is that all the modules are tightly integrated. We have Finance, HR, Supply Chain, and others. Because they're all integrated, HR data, for example, is available in the Finance and Supply Chain modules. It's an enterprise system, so integration is the best feature that it has.

We can efficiently access data from one module in another when necessary. This provides us with transparency of data across our different business segments.

I think the main drawback and complaints are related to the UI. It needs modernization and more user-friendly-ness. Compared to other webpage interfaces, the Oracle screens are not user-friendly, so they need to improve it. I do think, however, that Oracle is spending more time with the UI of new versions, but there are so many places where they're still using old-looking UIs.

Other areas of improvement are better and more tightly-integrated reporting tools. Most reporting today is done outside of Oracle, meaning we have to buy a third-party tool. It would help us if Oracle had a better, integrated reporting product.

I have been working on it for almost 20 years.

We have no issues deploying it.

It's stable. We haven't really had issues with instability.

It's scalable for our needs and we've had no issues doing so.

Technical support is not the best and have to keep pushing. There have been a lot of times when we keep calling to get prompt support or escalations to a manager in order to get better support. This is an area that has deteriorated over time as we used to get better support. I don't know why, but with the number of clients increasing, the level of support has dropped.

The initial setup was definitely not straightforward. One reason is because we've customized the product and it's not as-is. We have so many customizations and interfaces and reports and other things, that we have to make sure that they all work with the new versions. And that takes time: for example, we did an upgrade two years ago from version 11 to 12.1.3. This was an eight-month process for us from development to testing to production. So this was a huge project.

Even when Oracle releases patches just to upgrade maybe one module, we still go through a testing just to make sure everything works. We don't just blindly put it in production because we have seen a lot of issues. We have faced a lot of issues earlier when we put up bad patches, something stops working, and then we have to fix it again. We just make sure that we test that patch before we put it.

It does the job. It's what we are looking for. It has a lot of features, and Oracle is constantly upgrading and adding things to that, so it's a solid product, but there is always room for improvement.

It immediately resolved an issue we had because, as a spin-off company, we were operating on a transitional service agreement and had to get off the previous systems. E-Business Suit allowed us to do that, having an immediate impact.

Although I don't have daily, hands-on work with E-Business Suite, I know that my colleagues are concerned with its reporting and dashboarding abilities. They'd like better reporting on data and dashboard functionalities.

We've been using it for three years.

We've had no issues deploying it.

E-Business Suite wasn't initially stable, but it has been in the last year-and-a-half.

It has scaled for our needs.

The previous solution wasn't our system, so we had to do something else. At prior companies, our executive management and some of the leadership team had experience with Oracle and always had good success. We did a lot of homework and research. There was interest in considering at least one of the manufacturing ERP systems, and we did give that solution a consideration. But from a pure finance, non-manufacturing perspective, Oracle was the way for us to go.

It was straightforward because we wanted to use Oracle out-of-the-box. There were a few extensions, but we wanted to adopt the processes rather than change the system to support our processes. We knew that there was going to be expanded scope and implementations globally. We wanted to keep it simple.

The integration of the various, different modules within E-Business Suite is the key feature for us. For example, we use Payables, Assets, and GL, to name a few.

Because we're using out-of-the-box features, it's given us efficiencies in our operations. For instance, the way we use iExpress for paying invoices is an out-of-the-box functionality. We haven't had to customize anything, yet we've been highly successful in using it.

Oracle tends to be slower when it comes to bringing flashy functionalities than other, smaller entities can deliver. For us, we were eager to see a smartphone app, and now it's available and we're ready to implement it.

I learned from PeopleSoft that they already have OFAC as an engine within the product. EBS doesn't have it yet, and I wish they would because then I can integrate OFAC with my supplier database without a third-party tool.

We've been a user of Oracle since 1996.

We've never had any serious issues. There have been a couple of scenarios where we were told ahead of time of a change or update over a weekend and that we might experience issues because of it.

We've had no issues with instability.

It's scaled sufficiently for our needs.

Technical support has been good. We haven't had any problems with them.

The initial setup was complex from our perspective because we were new to all Oracle products at the time.

We ended up going with an outside firm to do our deployment of EBS. We just simply provided data at the time because we didn't know much about Oracle. Over time, we've become experts in some areas.

It's an expensive product, though worth it for larger businesses.

It's not intended for smaller entities because it's costly. For large organizations like ours, its ability to handle our data volume with stability is, for us, a perfect match.

The most valuable feature for us is that it gives us the ability to process the requisitions from our end users quickly, which is tied into all of our financials. It's given us a quick, easy, seamless process to do that.

E-Business Suite ties together many modules -- financials, procurement, HR, and many others. So that's the biggest benefit for us: it's just one platform. We don't have to deal with a lot of different external modules. They're all tied together neatly.

I wish that it was more public-sector friendly. It just seems like with the encumbrances, they slow down the process a little bit, and most public sector entities like us use encumbrance accounting.

In the private sector, invoices are paid when goods or services are received. However, in the public sector with encumbrance accounting, funds are reserved against the budget so that there are no overages. Once funds are committed, we've agreed to purchase goods or services without having already received them. Without encumbrance accounting, we wouldn't know whether a good or service has been received until after the invoice is paid and entered into the system.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

It's not 100% stable. As I'm a functional user, I notify IT to fix issues. Whether they do it or ask Oracle to do it, I'm not sure.

We haven't had any issues with scalability. For us, it seems to run at the same speed with the same functionality whether we have one user or a thousand.

I wish they would improve on it. For a functional user like me, technical support has been tough. With SR's, I've had to go back and forth. It seems like this is one area that hasn't improved in the ten years I've used Oracle. They have analyzers, but sometimes we just need help from Oracle support.

I was involved in the initial setup and had help along the way. The setups were easy for me, but I know that the technical portions of the install with our IT guys had some glitches.

We had third-party help in some regards, but then our DBA and our system admin knew most of the areas that we needed to for setup to convert from 11i to 12.1.

It's complex. In my opinion, it's similar to Apple products. It's complex in nature, and once you're on it you need to stay on it. Don't be afraid of the look and feel of it, because I've been on other products and although some of the other products look and feel a little bit better at the beginning, they are all buggy. They all have their issues, and I like Oracle products.