Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

The flexibility to scale up is very good. Regardless of the customer, customization is not as complicated as it is in SAP or even ISS and other products. 

There is a range of modules available in Oracle which you can switch on as you progress in your organization. You don't have to necessarily take a lot of time to kickstart the implementation. You can just start with basic HR, finance, and purchasing. Then, later on, you can extend the application landscape with more modules as you progress. There is essentially one solution for every industry within Oracle — you won't require a third-party solution. Still, if you wish to use a third-party solution because the price is too high or because of a specific technical requirement, then you are free to do so. 

I currently work for a company that specializes in aircraft maintenance. There used to be a module in Oracle called CMRO. Now, the current situation is that they are pretty much closing down that module. Roughly eight or nine years back when they started it, they were anticipating a good number of customers but the reality turned out to be different — that's why they closed down that module. That created a lot of trouble for a lot of companies. Truthfully speaking, that is the reason I moved towards ISS. Although it's not as popular as Oracle or SAP, ISS focuses on industries. ISS provides us with an industry-based solution, geared toward aviation, field service management, or manufacturing for example. 

Oracle E-Business Suite uses an old technology (Forms), which is Java-based. If you're using a functionality that is based on Oracle Forms, then the client machine needs to download an applet in order to use that function. Often I've encountered, during support issues, that the client machine, if it is a little obsolete or an older version, the Java versions cause trouble. Wherein if you look at the modern cloud perspective or modern software in general, it's mostly web or browser-based. That's one thing that Oracle should consider on-prem.

There is still a huge amount of customers who are on on-prem. Upgrades should have a business case. I don't want to upgrade just because Oracle has come up with a new version — I should have some benefits. We are one of those customers who are not interested in shifting to the cloud for various reasons. Because of this, we have to live with this old Forms technology. Oracle should try to offer a balance between both versions instead of pushing customers to the cloud. This seems to be a strategy that both SAP and Oracle follow.

I have been using Oracle E-Business Suite for more than one year. In total, I have more than 10 years of experience with Oracle. 

Oracle E-Business Suite is definitely stable. 

Regarding their technical support, my personal experience over a period of two to three years is that you'll begin to notice a pattern regarding what time you should raise a service request so that it reaches the right place. Whether it goes to India or to Egypt — these are the two most popular centers for Oracle support. But if you manage to hit the right people, the support is there. 70 to 80 percent of the time, I receive a solution to my problems simply through the technical repository — within the portal itself. I prefer to do it like this rather than by creating a service request and waiting for a response from a potentially inexperience staff member. I'd rather just depend on the documentation. The documentation is very rich. The Oracle community is big.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. I have worked with SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, and now I'm using ISS. With all of them, you need to have some basic expertise before you jump into the pool, otherwise, your life could be complicated. If you have that basic guidance and experience, it's not complicated when it comes to Oracle. Still, there are prerequisites for each of them — especially when it comes to Oracle. You need to have had hands-on experience with PL/SQL or developer experience with Java.

The best part about Oracle is that it has openly published its documentation on its implementation checklist — how to follow, configure, etc. For this reason, it's much easier to implement Oracle compared to ISS or SAP, for example. This is due to the fact that they insist that you need to follow their documentation and it's not publicly available everywhere. This makes things a bit easier when it comes to Oracle.

If you're buying a license, support is roughly 22% of the price of the whole product. So, in the first year, you'll definitely get support. Some companies, over a period of time, try to knock off the Oracle support costs because it just keeps growing. Every year, according to their published price, it will increase from three to five percent from the last year. Now, imagine you bought a product worth 1.5 billion; what would be the support cost in the first year? And then plus 5%, plus 5% — it goes on, and on. You'll come to a point where you feel you're wasting money because support is support whether I am paying for five users or 500 users.

There is a solution for all of your current problems in Oracle E-Business Suite, but the constraint is the license. I'll give you a live example. Let's say I bought an employee self-service. What I would get is a bunch of licenses that I can use on the web version on my local internet. But with the current model of digitalization, you know that the employees would prefer to have some sort of mobile app or at least a desktop site. So, if I want that to happen, then I'd need to buy another set of licenses. The same self-service on the mobile version.

These are the pain points with Oracle. The license is normalized or broken down to such a level that it becomes a pain. Regarding a new customer, unless he's been using this solution for two or three years, he won't get used to these licenses. There is a good chance that he'd become exploited by Oracle's account managers in terms of licenses. Oracle's licenses are not straightforward.

Personally, I have worked on several projects where I have had to help customers understand Oracle licensing — it's not simple in SAP either. There are pros and cons to both solutions. Sometimes it could be beneficial and sometimes it's troublesome. That is something I feel that Oracle should try to simplify.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven. 

Oracle E-Business Suite is not for small businesses as, over a period of time, you will incur a huge cost when it comes to hosting. It's not just about application licensing, there is also hosting infrastructure, etc. It's not the functionality that's the problem for small entities, it's the overall cost. Smaller companies should go for something like AppDynamics, SAP Business, or NetSuite. 

Oracle is best suited for large organizations — from medium to large. It's a great solution for companies who grow quickly and need the best scalability possible. Unless you have a minimum user base of 3,000, you shouldn't be using Oracle.

Oracle is for medium to large-sized companies that are projected to grow in one or two years. Otherwise, it will become a pain point for you because the IT expenses will shoot through the roof. As a product, as a functionality, if you check this particular prerequisite, I would definitely recommend it.

One of the best use cases is centralizing supplier and customer data into our finance system. We identified that there were many duplicate suppliers and customers and so a lot of time was spent reporting.

When the tsunami happened in 2009, our top management asked us how many suppliers were impacted in that particular area and how it would impact our supply chain cycle. When we tried to answer this question we thought that it would take one or two weeks, but it took our entire team three to four months to identify how many suppliers were impacted. That showed how important it is to remove the master data from our financial system and start maintaining it separately.

Reporting and MIS reporting is very useful in the E-Business Suite. Without the solution, it always took a lot of time because of so many duplicate supplier data settings. 

After 2009, supply chain management became more important, and we really started thinking about how quickly we could get the product to our customers. When we thought about becoming a global supply chain organization, the number one goal was how we could clean our data, how we can identify our master data. Previously, IT used to own the data, but we are trying to change that process where the data is owned by the business and IT is just there to provide a service.

That's where governance comes into the picture. Not just the implementation of the master data management, but identifying the functional data owner for each and every master attribute, and having a discussion within the governance team.

The most valuable aspect is making sure that IT was not blindly adding an attribute as a master attribute. When creating a proposal, for example, if anybody comes back and wants to add a DUNS number in the supplier master, we then ask for this particular attribute, how is the data going to be generated? 

Then, what should the business process of this data be and the attribute maintenance? Who is going to own this attribute? And then, most importantly, what are the data quality rules for this attribute, whether there are any ISO standards or any standards that are connected, or the character length, special characters, etc.

The way things are going, Oracle is not putting much effort into their master data management. They need to look into machine data and then the integrated data domain. How, in the master data domain, do the product supplier, site master and reference data talk to one another. 

They really need to improve on this because that was my number one reason for moving to Informatica and other tools.

We have been using this solution as a point of creation and maintenance for supplier data for the last seven years.

The stability of the solution is perfectly fine.

I would rate scalability a 9 out of 10. We don't have any issues with it. 

I think support is good.

It is straightforward, but maybe that is because I have been working in Oracle for the last 20 years and so I find it easy. But I think with Oracle products, the set up and to understand everything is very easy and user friendly.

For implementation, it took about two years. It took a lot of time because of so much duplicate data. Application-related setups were relatively easy. The main challenge was to identify the right data because we had about one million records.

We implemented it in a two-phased approach. First, pulling in the clean data, which we spent near one year. And then, we moved the creation and maintenance process to a master header system, which took another year.

We used an integrator that was quite good.

The biggest return on investment is the improvements of productivity.

The pricing of the solution is at about $700-$750 per year.

We have been using this as an enterprise solution for many things including for financials, for supply chain, for sales, for maintenance, for manufacturing, et cetera. You name it. It helps us with many business processes.  

As we have been using this for the past nine years we have had the opportunity to explore the product. Really everything has worked well and all the modules are very good. The financial parts are very good, the sales part is also very good, the maintenance of our supply-chain is meeting our requirements. It has been very helpful and it is hard to separate out one thing that is better.  

After the announcement of the cloud products, the on-premises products from Oracle are not garnering as much development attention. Some of the new features that used to come to us earlier before the cloud product are now coming at a slow pace. So we want Oracle to work on the on-premises product in parallel with their cloud product. E-Business Suite should not fall behind.  

What I want to improve about this product is the user interface. In some of the modules compared to recent, cloud module releases do not have a very nice look-and-feel because they are letting the on-premises product age. Compared to the advanced cloud modules, this product has some rigid look-and-feel for the user experience.  

We have been using the Oracle E-Business Suite for about nine years.  

I am satisfied with the stability of most of the Oracle products which we are using right now. The problem is not the stability but a lack of new development.  

I think the E-Business Suite is very highly scalable. Right now in my organization, we have around 1000 total users. We have been increasing usage over the years and have plans to increase usage going into the future. We are going to continue to use the on-premises product in the future because it is not easy for us to migrate to any other products. That is primarily because it is a huge implementation here.  

We do have experience with the product technical support. Whenever the support is assigned to India, we are not satisfied with it because we do not get quality support from teams in India. But whenever that support is assigned to any other country — that may be from the US or any European country — the support is phenomenal. When we reach good support they know the product very well and the experience is good. That is where I think the Indian resources are a bit concerning. The support from them really takes a lot of time.  

We were using another product nine or ten years ago. It was a very old product made by IBM. That was AS/400.  

I think the initial setup is done in a very smart way. It is not very complex. If a person is technical enough to do it, it will be easy for him or her. If someone is not comfortable doing the installation, it will be difficult for him or her. 

The deployment was about nine years back, so I do not remember everything exactly. I think it took us around two to three days. What I consider deployment may have a different definition for some people and may not be the same definition for me. As long as by 'deployment' it means just the installation and initial configuration, then it is just a few days. When it comes to setting up and finalizing all of the business requirements and going live with the system, it took us four to five months.  

We used a consultant for the deployment. It was from an Oracle partner in Pakistan.  

Even though we used the services of a consultant, we have an in-house support team. We do not require any support from outside and no longer require or include any external vendors. So we have a team of around 25 people supporting this application.  

The advice that I would give to others who want to start using this product is that, in this day and age, you need to first evaluate different products. At the very least you would want to compare the E-Business Suite with the other Oracle cloud products.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the Oracle E-Business product at an eight-out-of-ten.  

Oracle E-Business Suite is an ERP solution produced by Oracle. As with any other ERP system, it can handle any organization and business portal, including human resources, financials, supply chain, business intelligence, payrolls, etc. It's a very powerful tool as an ERP system.

The most valuable feature of Oracle E-Business Suite is the customization. Compared to other competitor systems, you can find a larger customization scale in the solution, usually in all layers, starting from the database, reports, and modules. The solution can create custom modules from scratch.

The document that supports the Oracle E-Business Suite regarding the installation and upgrading is long compared to other products and needs to be enhanced. Some components of Oracle E-Business Suite, like the database, GDK, and WebLogic, stop at a certain point, which is not its last version.

I have been using Oracle E-Business Suite for three to four years.

We may encounter some bugs with the solution, which we usually deal with easily by referring to Oracle support.

I rate Oracle E-Business Suite an eight out of ten for stability.

The solution's scalability has many layers. If you want to scale the number of application nodes, you have some steps. Scaling the database nodes takes a lot of time and extra effort.

I rate Oracle E-Business Suite a seven out of ten for scalability.

The solution’s customer support is good.

The solution's initial setup is average because you cannot directly install the version you need. Firstly, you should install all the database versions, take some steps to enable online patching, use the ETCC script, upgrade the database, and upgrade the application to the version you need.

If you work in a comfortable environment and have deadlines, the solution can be deployed in two weeks.

Overall, I rate Oracle E-Business Suite a nine out of ten.

I primarily use E-Business Suite for trading and procurement.

E-Business Suite's best features are the standard process, the table dictionary, and the ability to work with the SQL language to correlate data.

E-Business Suite's pricing could be lower. In the next release, E-Business Suite should include the HIS information system and 360-degree feedback.

I've been using E-Business Suite for eight years.

E-Business Suite is stable.

E-Business Suite is scalable.

I previously used SAP.

The initial setup was a little complex, and deployment took between twenty and thirty minutes to complete.

We used an in-house team.

E-Business Suite's pricing could be lower.

I would rate E-Business Suite seven out of ten.

We do not use Oracle E-Business Suite. We provide support and customization for the platform. 

Our clients, on the other hand, use Oracle E-Business Suite for administration, finances, and inventory. 

In our clients, eBS has enhanced the capacity to attend large volumes of transactions, which allows them to quickly attend to requests from their own clients and a prompt response from their suppliers.

The financial aspect of Oracle E-Business Suite is the most valuable for our customers. The solution is perfect for big industry and high-scale e-business transactions. 

Oracle E-Business Suite is not great for small and medium-sized enterprises. Those clients are better suited for Oracle's NetSuite. 

It would be great to see Oracle E-Business Suite become less dependent on the SOA solution, which is an integration solution for Oracle platforms. 

I have been a partner for Oracle E-Business Suite for 28 years. We have been implementing and supporting e-businesses since the beginning. 

Oracle E-Business Suite is very stable. In fact, that is why most clients land on this solution.

Oracle is continuously patching, upgrading, and reporting any changes or security issues, which contributes greatly to the stability of the solution. 

The scalability is good. However, how well it scales will depend on who is implementing the scaling. It has to be carried out by a highly-skilled team. Technical support comes in handy here. 

Oracle provides good support for the E-Business Suite. 

Positive

Oracle E-Business Suite does have a complicated deployment model. It is a SaaS solution, so deployment entails multiple databases and server configuration. The connection between the database and the application has to be configured as well. 

You do have to have expertise to carry out the implementation, however, I would rate the overall difficulty of the employment at a medium. 

The average deployment would require five skilled consultants. Some very basic deployments could be done with one or two deployment developer consultants. 

We got a return on our investment in a year with Oracle E-Business Suite. 

Oracle E-Business Suite is expensive. I don't know how much a license costs exactly, but I would wager it's around $1 million. This is a big implementation. 

The biggest selling points for Oracle E-Business Suite are business continuity, financial support, and accounting support. 

On a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and 10 being the best, I would give Oracle E-Business Suite a nine. The only reason I would not give the solution a 10 is because you need a partner for everything you would like to do with the solution, things like implementation, maintenance, and upgrades. 

Oracle E-Business Suite is used for demand and supply planning, supply chain planning, and optimizations.

Oracle E-Business Suite improves forecast accuracy, reduces costs, and increases manufacturing capacity.

Oracle E-Business Suite's stability could be improved as they have a lot of bugs that need to be fixed. Their integration and data cleaning could also be better. Oracle is focusing too much on Oracle Cloud, and E-Business Suite is missing out on new features.

I've worked with Oracle E-Business Suite for twenty-two years.

Oracle E-Business Suite is scalable.

Oracle's technical support is very good.

The initial setup was very easy.

Oracle may not be a good choice for businesses with no complexity. I would give Oracle E-Business Suite a rating of eight out of ten.

We use E-Business Suite for managing finances.

The interface is easy to use. 

The system alerts could be improved.

I've been using E-Business Suite for more than two years.

E-Business Suite is stable.

E-Business Suite is scalable. There are about 2,000 users on average.

Oracle support is helpful.

The cost of the license depends on the price you can negotiate with the vendor. 

I rate E-Business Suite about seven out of 10. My advice for future users is to ensure you get the correct license.