Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP Reviews

To begin with, Oracle Financials is especially valuable. It is one of the most complex financial solution in the world. It helps us, day-to-day, manage our cash flow and manage our fixed assets, plus even getting proper reporting done because we didn't have a proper system previously. This solution will really work. It brings a lot of added value to us.

If you look at it from the support point of view, the product has to improve a lot, especially from the bug fixing side.

It’s something that they sell, so Oracle needs to determine their priorities. From what we have seen, Oracle is making Oracle Cloud a higher priority. Now, the Oracle On Premises customers are having difficulty with getting certain updates on time. Those are the areas that we have seen that there are a lot of improvements to be done.

We have been using it for about two years now. We mainly use Oracle Financials. One of our subsidiaries is currently going through a process on implementing Oracle modules, including the purchasing, inventory, product manufacturing, and order management. Those are the modules that they're using.

In terms of the system point of view, we haven't seen any downtime or anything like that. Now, we have seen with Oracle Cloud, there are a lot of nice features which have come out. As far as we are concerned, we have not seen any downtime.

It is scalable. In terms of the application, it is scalable.

I think it will continue to work for us scalability-wise. Oracle Financials itself has its own strengths scaling it to a different extent. We believe that we can scale it up when the business is also scaling up.

Oracle support for this application is not up to the standard. From the database point of view, Oracle support is very good. When it comes to this application, if you look at the SaaS, it takes a long time for Oracle to provide some of the solutions. That is where we have seen where Oracle is lacking on supporting the customers in that sense.

We would definitely recommend the Oracle ERP platform to them because it would create a lot of added value for them. Having said that, on the backend side, there is a lot of infrastructure to be developed. Our advice is to work from a different context: either put the backend application on their own cloud, or come up with their own infrastructure; hard drives, etc.

It is not at the top extreme end, but it has a lot of features which goes into the top extreme end. If you look at the application, it needs to be developed a lot.

In the market, there are only a few handfuls of products that are reliable ERP products. One is SAP, you have Oracle E-Business Suite, and you have a few other legacy products still available in the market. When we spun off the company from Agilent to Avago, Agilent was already in E-Business Suite. Straightaway, we moved our system. When we spun off the company as Avago, we deployed everything in E-Business Suite straightaway.

There are a lot of features they can enhance. That would take some time, to go into a very detailed level of the product, especially in the area of the user interface, functionality and collaboration. They could do a lot of things.

When it comes to support, there's definitely room for improvement. Initially, support was very tough. When it moved to U.S., we got better support, but there is a lot of room to improve the support.

I have been using it for about ten years; nine-plus years.

Honestly, it's a very, very stable product. We have not seen any issues.

Of course, periodically, we may end up in some fixes and for that, we get support from Oracle to fix that. We have a support team available 24x7 team. We get good support from Oracle, as well as from our partners.

The EBS is scalable. We were three node: three node middle tier, three node in database, two node in external. We scaled up to four node: four node in internal, external, as well as database. Now we are in five node: Five-node middle tier, five-node external tier, and five-node RAC database cluster. Any time you scale up, the only downstream impact is required downtime.

When it comes to support from Oracle, over the last few months, I believe they have changed the worldwide support team structure. We're seeing some challenges in getting support, especially the first level support. With Oracle, if the person is not able to fix the issue, there's no such thing as delegating to the next level. We have that challenge.

Other challenges I’ve seen are cross-platform challenges. People from ERP and the people from hosting do not talk to each other. If you have some in-between issue – hosting-related issues end up with having issues in ERP – the two teams do not talk to each other internally. We ask them to talk to each other. We collaborate with both teams at same time. It is very difficult for us sometimes; it's challenging for us.

At the same time, we are using multiple products from Oracle. We have the Fusion stack, we have the ERP stack, we have the OBIEE stack, we have the IDM stack. Sometimes we have seen some challenges when comes to cross-application collaboration between the teams.

The initial setup, when we spun off, we were in 11.5.9, 11.5.10. Two years back, we upgraded from 11.5.10 to 12.1. Then, just a few months back we upgraded from 12.1 to 12.2. It's not straightforward; it's complex. It's a complex upgrade when it comes. Getting support from Oracle, especially related to this product, is a bit tough, very tough.

I definitely recommend it; the product is really good. There is no doubt this product is really good and scalable. One good part is the reverse engineering, the changes and all those things that comes with Oracle products; it's easy to do, easy to manage and easy to maintain also. I definitely recommend it, no doubt. The only thing is that I always have some challenge with the support; that will continue to be the case.

Especially, if you look at today's world, the cloud is the important feature we are looking at. There is not much cost involved, especially with cloud. I get to pay for whatever I'm consuming. I don't have to pay for the vast infrastructure and all. That's one of the important things.

Specifically, from a back office systems perspective – storing from financials or from manufacturing systems, or to store an order to cash process – it is a complete suite; end-to-end application.

That's what we feel is very helpful for our organization.

Especially on the CRM side, the CRM modules are a bit weak compared to the financials. Traditionally, Oracle is known for Oracle financials, as opposed to the manufacturing, service or sales sides of the house. Sales and service are the areas where Oracle has to catch up.

Deployment is fairly straightforward, but we haven't seen many successes with the cloud. That’s not because of Oracle; it’s because of the customers themselves. They are hesitant in terms of moving everything to cloud. They are doing it in bits and pieces, in terms of very few systems to start with; the financials cloud, the HCM Cloud or the supply chain cloud. They are still testing the waters.

Technical support is good. Most of the time, the response is good, especially if you have any priority issues. Sometimes it depends on what kind of support agreement you have with Oracle; depending on whether you have the heightened coverage, Gold or Platinum. Having mentioned that, there are certain cases where we got very minimal support, especially during the quarterly reports and all, which are very big for us from a revenue standpoint. From a support standpoint, there is some improvement that needs to be made.

Just go with the baby steps in terms of starting to move peripheral systems onto cloud, and then slowly picking up. For example, HR is one area where you can quickly move to cloud. Similarly, then you can look at the financials, then you can look at the manufacturing, and so on with other applications.

They are supporting very well the migration itself from on-prem to cloud, especially because they are partnering with the customer. If you are having an implementation, doing it for a customer, Oracle is partnering with it, and we are jointly doing that.

The security is the most valuable feature. If you didn't have the PIN, you can’t actually get into the system, to work. It reduces the possibility of somebody coming in who doesn’t have the credentials, to actually get into the system. I think the security is probably the most essential part of it.

As I’ve mentioned, the security prevents the possibility of someone coming in without having the credentials and getting into our system.

For some reason, we had a problem: We gave PINs out to everybody and for some people, the PIN didn't actually work for some reason. We never really found out why, and we went away from the PIN because we had a lot of our functional areas that were complaining. The technical area, where we work at, we didn't have a problem. The functional areas were having problems.

We had issues as we added more users. That was the problem. We rolled it out with just the security staff, the IT staff, and then we rolled it out to the end users. That's when we ran into problems. They were having problems.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. By that point, when we went to Oracle, Oracle was our host, we were just taking everything they were offering; we were just jumping on it. Now, we're using Sierra-Cedar.

Conduct a little more due diligence before rolling it out; not necessarily roll it out with the technical staff first. Roll it out to the end users, and see what kind of reaction you get from them. You can always come back to the technical. We have more security than anybody else anyway. Roll it out with the end users first.

I have rated highly because I didn't have any problems. I felt really good, because I know nobody could actually access my system without my PIN. As far as university-wide, I would not rate it as highly, because a lot of the end users were having issues. They were critical parts, like student financials, which is a very critical part of the university. When they were having problems, they couldn't get on the system. We had to override it, and it got to the point where it wasn't worth it. We had to continually override it. What's the point of having it, if you have to override it?

The financial features are pretty good. The users love them.

The finance users would like to be able to drill down into all of the details. Right now, we have to consider third-party software for drilling down.

We have been using it since 2005, 11 years.

It has never crashed.

We have made some customizations. It has totally met the needs for the financial department.

Initial setup is complex. We hired an outside consultant to do the implementation for us.

We chose Oracle because we think it is a big, stable company. We don’t want to find ourselves down the road, and the company is suddenly gone and we are left without any support.

This Oracle product is definitely good for at least mid-size companies. For smaller companies, it's too expensive. For bigger companies, it's very good.