Oracle Hyperion Reviews

Our primary use case for the product involves supporting customers in constructing forecasting models within the Oracle Hyperion platform.

With this solution, logic, calculations, and other functionalities are centralized, eliminating reliance on specific personnel. Additionally, employees gain value from working with advanced products like Hyperion, enhancing their skill sets.

The cloud storage engine is the most valuable financial analysis feature, and it is highly powerful and has useful workflows.

They could support machine learning algorithms for the product. Such functionality would make operations easier for finance executives in the next five years. They are trying to edit the functions, but automation learning is moving at a fast pace. Oracle must quickly implement or provide these features as customers increasingly demand them. This is the biggest trend emerging from the customer side.

We have been using Oracle Hyperion for 15 years.

The stability of the on-premise versions is quite impressive.

We have more than 20 Oracle Hyperion users in our organization. It is a scalable product.

The initial setup is straightforward, particularly when working with a consultant company that has already explained its use case.

The deployment process typically starts with understanding customer requirements through a discovery phase. Once the scope and requirements are agreed upon, the solution is implemented. Data validation, especially for financial closure, is conducted to ensure accuracy. Finally, the solution is deployed to production.

The pricing model for the cloud setup is subscription-based, typically monthly. On the other hand, Oracle on-premise is user-based, meaning organizations pay upfront for an annual subscription, depending on the number of users they require. It might be considered relatively costly compared to some alternatives.

The platform's data integration is indeed powerful. We can collect data from various sources, which is very useful for budgeting and planning.

The impact on financial processes is significant. It dramatically reduces the time required. Without such solutions, financial consolidation or closure may take around ten days. However, with Oracle Hyperion, for instance, there are real use cases where customers can close their month or quarter within a maximum of five days.

One of the main challenges has been related to the requirements we receive from customers. Some of the features and functionalities they require are not available in the cloud version of Oracle Hyperion.

Besides recommending the product itself, it's crucial to emphasize the importance of aligning with a reputable consulting company with experience in multiple projects.

I rate the product an eight out of ten.

At our organization, the solution is deployed on-premises. We work in the mining business, and a lot of restructuring needs to be translated into our planning. We have a lot of cubes in Oracle Hyperion, and we manage a lot of business units. The primary use case is to translate our processes and environment into forecasts and budgets.

Oracle Hyperion helped make things work faster in our company.

The calculation power is the most valuable feature.

The reporting could be improved. It is challenging to do reporting on Oracle Hyperion if you're not an expert, and you may have to use an add-on to simplify it. For example, our company uses financial reports, and it's challenging for people that don't have all the technical skills.

This solution requires a lot of specialized people because it's not very easy to navigate. More specifically, you may need a specialist or expert in formulas and dealing with the interface. In addition, it requires multiple sheets and many templates.

Additionally, it is not very secure and does not have all the required security.

We have been using this solution for the past 12 months.

Oracle Hyperion is generally stable. There are minor issues, but in general, it is a stable platform. 

We have a plan to increase the usage of Oracle Hyperion. We may upgrade to Oracle Essbase 21c, OneStream, or even use our own platform.

I have used Oracle's technical support to settle several tickets. If I were to rate the technical support, I would rate it five out of five.

Positive

We only used Excel in the past.

We completed the deployment in-house and also completed an upgrade that took us four months.

There has been a return on investment since we started using this solution.

The initial setup was complicated. I would rate the setup a four out of five in terms of the level of complication. You need to understand how calculations work in Oracle Hyperion and know information about the rule files.

I don't have all the data on licensing costs because another business area in my company makes those deals. However, I know we currently have an SLA, and as far as I am aware, it's just the standard licensing fee and no other cost.

I have thought about using PowerBI for reporting purposes. However, I'm only familiar with Oracle Essbase 21c for financial reports. In-house, we have a platform developing house similar to Oracle Planning, where we get all the information from the system.

We have hundreds of users of this solution in the company, and we have two environments. In terms of maintenance in our data center, we have three people in charge of the infrastructure and seven functional actors that deal with formulas or cubes. 

I would like to see features from Oracle Essbase 21c on Oracle Hyperion in the next release. Oracle Essbase 21c is web-based and helpful in managing all the cubes. However, my role is more admin-focused, so I can't speak about the technical maintenance on Oracle Essbase 21c.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution primarily for financial planning and forecasting, to determine how much cash flow is required on a monthly basis.

The roll-up potential of the product is very good, meaning we have detailed information and we want it to be summarized, based on geography, different product lines, or different charts of accounts in the general ledger. It rolls up the information in a very concise way. This makes it easy to understand the overall performance for its forecasting aspects, either quarterly reporting, year-to-year, or month-to-month reporting.

Configuration is a little complex, it's not very easy. The solution is integrated with Essbase and there are not many users of the Essbase database.

If they can provide different modules for each subject area, like supply chain, for inventory forecasting or for order management forecasting, it would make each subject area easier to manage.

I have been using this solution for over 10 years. 

After setup, the solution was stable, it performs well and delivers what we expect from it. 

It's not scalable. It's not scalable. We are moving away from it, with the ERP cloud migration, we will retire this product.

There are over 50 Oracle Hyperion users in our company.

Before using Oracle Hyperion I used Aprimo, a Teradata product. 

Aprimo is very fast, so if we are using a structured dataset it is unbeatable. It's very fast and very easy to set up. It has different modules depending on what kind of forecasting you want to do, whether that's related to planning, to the supply chain, to order management, or to inventory management.

In Hyperion, we don't have those modules, it's complete customization, and it's basically for finance only. These are the basic differences.

Aprimo is expensive, Oracle Hyperion is cheap.

The initial setup was 10 years ago and I wasn't with the company then so it would be difficult to say how much time it took, but we talk about monthly or yearly deployment.

I distinctly remember teams talking about it, it was not easy, and the team used to call it a black box. They called it that due to the number of abstraction layers between data, so nobody knew how it handled the data sets.

The solution was implemented via an in-house team.

The solution is affordable.

We will continue using the solution for now but we will definitely implement a different solution in the future. 

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

I'm the subject matter expert of the finance team, so in finance, we have a vice president who is actually head of the finance dataset. He reports directly to the CEO and is a big fan of Hyperion. He uses it for planning and forecasting each month, with a team of 14 or 15 core members, all of whom use Hyperion.

We also have a sales team and they use the Hyperion datasets for product discounting, based on the previous months track record of customers, they give discounts to the customers.

We are using it for cloud functionality and the accessibility of the service as a solution to a wider audience.

We are very happy with the product and we are beginning to move into OneStream as well.

One of the problems we have had with technical support when we are on a project, is we need technical support from senior-level technicians instead of being assigned, junior-level technicians. What I like is to have everything on one platform and not in different modules like Oracle Hyperion. For example, segregated planning and HFM consolidation. OneStream has everything together on one platform. There is less data movement, and with Oracle Hyperion, you have to move data between modules. I think that would be an improvement if they can merge those products. But it has been like that for so long I do not know if Oracle Hyperion has the appetite to do that.

I have been working with Oracle Hyperion for over twenty years.

We have found there to be excellent stability with Oracle Hyperion. We know that the latest version always has some bugs to work out and so we use the version before the latest one.

I have found Oracle Hyperion to be scalable. We are currently using it for medium to large corporate companies.

They respond quickly to our initial tickets. Sometimes we struggle on existing projects because Oracle Hyperion would assign us a junior technical support individual on these calls instead of a senior technical support representative, and it may take a longer period of time to have it resolved.

I think Oracle Hyperion has a good solution in comparison to other market comparables.

The initial setup is very easy and took us around four to five months to deploy.

We did have help with the deployment of Oracle Hyperion.

I hear customers complain about the licensing structure. Oracle Hyperion's licensing structures are quite expensive for some companies, especially medium-sized companies because of the user-based license. 

Do not underestimate the importance of testing in your project plan. The rule of time is to use the same amount of testing time that you would use on development. That is not always possible in the project plan because customers will come with a timeline and you have to squeeze where you can, and most of the time you actually sacrifice testing. So try and fight for more testing time, even if it extends the timeline. It is probably one of the top CPM products out there at the moment. I believe OneStream is making some headway. I think Oracle Hyperion has a challenge from OneStream at the moment, but Oracle Hyperion's still one of the top products out there. I would rate OracleHyperion a nine out of ten.

We use HFM as a consolidation tool because we own several different companies, and we consolidate up to the eliminations and allocations through Oracle Hyperion. Additionally, we use it to help us with foreign currency, and then we use planning for forecasting and capital five-year plan projections.

We are upgrading Oracle Hyperion to 11.2.5.

Oracle Hyperion is fairly user-friendly and not too complicated. The forecasting, it's really good. It's sometimes slow when there are a lot of users using it and we can have up to approximately 300 users using it. However, you can do it in Excel because there's an Excel add-in. This is a benefit because a lot of people do this way instead of having to go into the planning application itself.

Sometimes Oracle Hyperion is slow when there are a lot of users using it. However, we can have up to approximately 300 users using it.

There's a part of Hyperion that's called FDMEE and it can be quirky to use. Sometimes how people load data into the different applications when the data loads cause a problem for security. For example, if we have a new acquisition and we go in and we put security on it, it can mess up everybody's security. We then have to go back and uncheck some configurations. Hyperion is aware of the problem, they know it's a bug but they have not fixed it at this time.

The integration between the applications could be better. We use Extended Analytics Link(EAL), when we move data between the actuals and forecasts the reporting features could be enhanced.

I have been using Oracle Hyperion for approximately 20 years.

The solution is stable.

Oracle Hyperion is scalable. I have worked in many companies that use the solution in different ways and it has done very well.

I don't have to deal with technical support on a regular basis. The administrators of the applications use the support. I would sometimes listen in on the calls, but the administrators are the ones that use the support, and the support it's good, they're responsive. However, sometimes it feels as if they're reading a script.

If we have not received the support we want we escalate the call to a more experienced support agent.

The licenses cost approximately $1,000.

I would recommend this solution to others.

There are some enhancements that can be done, but it's fairly stable and it's easy to use.

I rate Oracle Hyperion an eight out of ten.

It's very easy to use and the functionality is quite complete. And it's easy even if you're not very familiar with BI technology. Most notably very easy and intuitive transformation from relational schema to multi dimensional schema. Complete tabular data presentation with full drilling process and statistical functions. Corresponding charting data presentation with full drilling functions. Full interactive reporting including tables and charts. Join unlimited queries into different databases.

Its GUI could use some refinement. I think it's easy to use, but it's hard to say because we are very familiar with this product and have been using it for many years. For a new user, this product should be updated to work better with the environments of new operating systems. Modernizing the user interface is something I would suggest. But, in terms of overall functionality, I have no complaints. At the same time, I don't know if I'm objective after having used it for so long. I don't know if a new user would have the same opinion as I do.

I have been using this solution for about 25 years. It used to be called the Brio Intelligence Suite. And then Brio was acquired by Hyperion, which was subsequently absorbed by Oracle. As they have done with Zibo, Oracle has incorporated all these BI tools into their BI platforms.

The Oracle technical support in our area is terrible. They don't offer support. Whenever we need it, we try to find solutions online. Before Oracle purchased the suite, support was okay. Oracle is a huge company and its focus is mainly is its database business. All the other businesses are complementary to this company and BI is not an exception. Generally, support is not Oracle's strong suit. Oracle is not interested in many of its products. They are purchasing the products in order to have access to the client

I would rate the Hyperion Business Intelligence platform eight out of 10. However, I would not recommend this product to a new user. When we started with the Brio platform, which has passed several stages of ownership, this product was a  highly rated product. That's why Oracle acquired it. The global user base was huge and we were doing business with this product. 

But after Oracle bought this product and it was abandoned, in a manner of speaking. They do not support it. They do not update the product. Although my opinion as a long-time user is generally positive, I would not recommend this product to a new user. Nowadays, there are other products that are better supported and updated by companies that have either bought them or developed them.

We use Hyperion for the consolidation process in our accounting department. Other departments work without our reports and analyze the information from Hyperion. 

The solution is deployed on-premises. We use the latest version.

There are 13 people in my team who are using this solution.

It's a very good program and it's useful for consolidation.

Hyperion allows us to update information and shows us reports, our balance, and P&L.

The analytics could be improved. I think we need the cloud version.

If I want to get information from a company, I need to send an email and they give me information from SAP, but not Hyperion.

When I want something to be improved, I work with our finance support team and they make the changes. 

I have used this solution since 2009.

It's stable. I would rate the stability as 4.5 out of 5.

We also use SAP and Microsoft Dynamics.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. I would recommend it to new users. I know of many companies that want to use Hyperion in their accounting departments.

Functionality-wise, it is what they say it is. It is the best in class, but it all ties back to your users. If your users are completely enamored with Excel spreadsheets, then breaking those habits is hard. What you really get is data governance and control. We haven't gone to the cloud service yet, so I really can't comment on that, but at the end of the day, depending on your users, the ability to forecast long-term is a great feature. We're in the process of putting that in, and some of the stakeholders are really excited about that functionality, but it's all about data governance. A company that was trying to do this on the cheap using an Oracle Essbase cloud service got data corruption in one month because they didn't have the necessary security, and people were overriding other people's plans.

From going from level one to four, they've done a lot with driving the user to control what they're doing versus having a dependency on an administrator to drive data movement. Again, it's all predicated on how your planners want to use the application. You can give them all the tools, but if they don't engage in that type of planning, then you can have a Cadillac system. If they're only going to use 10% of it, you're not going to drive that value.

All the planning systems out there are great. It doesn't matter which company you use. They're all great. I've seen demonstrations on a number of them, but it all boils down to the culture within the organization itself to use that functionality, understand it, and help drive it. I've had Oracle salespeople do demonstrations, and it looked really good. We get it on board, and everybody still sticks to their Excel spreadsheets because companies are a lot more complex than what you could deliver on the planning system. So, there should be more education on the capabilities, and there should be more understanding of organizations in terms of the way they access the data in order to plan. Because my organization is complex and there are different data streams, they don't bolt into Hyperion very well. You still have to extract the information and load it in, which is really difficult, especially if you have older systems or if you're going from a mainframe system for some of that information because there is no application out there now that's bolting on the mainframe systems.

We have the full suite with consolidation. We have Hyperion Financial Management. Our challenges, if we ever have one, are really on the server-side, because you're dealing with SQL Server, as well as your Essbase Server, especially for planning. If those servers go down within the organization, it's not Hyperion's fault. It's your own organization's fault. So, from a stability perspective, it's extremely stable. If you're going to go to the cloud, the internal factors that could trip you would go away. You would be within Oracle's ecosystem, and you don't have to spend the money to have a DBA managing your application on the backend. My team is a bit of a hybrid. We report to the business, but we do all the setups within the application itself.

I have rarely interacted with them. At least with Hyperion planning, we've been pretty self-sufficient, and we haven't hit a bug. 

If you read their game plan, they're pushing everybody to the cloud. We're not on the cloud application yet. We're on an older version that's being retired.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We use Hyperion for budgeting and forecasting. We provide CC guidance through that application. We use the Hyperion HFM for our consolidations worldwide.

We're on 11.2.4, and we're going to patch to 11.2.6.

It is easy to use. It is very intuitive. Even though there is a lot of functionality that comes out of the box, you can customize the solutions to meet your needs. You have the ability to have business rules that produce all kinds of calculations. We're international, and we do all our FX conversions through that.

It is very easy to upload the data from ERP to HFM. We actually go from the ERP to HFM, and then from HFM, we load those actuals into our planning application.

Their documentation could be a little bit more descriptive at places. They don't really do a lot of How-Tos because that gets pushed through to the consulting groups. There have been some books. There is a real good one out there about how to look smarter than you are with Hyperion Planning that some people at a company called ArganoInterRel wrote. Those things do exist, but that's not in their documentation. It's basically like they'll say, "This is the field. This is what it's used for," but they don't tell you how to particularly use it in your case environment.

I have been using it since 2000.

It is better than average. They do a lot to help you work through issues with a chat session to start with, but depending on the level of severity, you can have somebody wired right into you. They do a Webex and look at what you're doing, and they test it out and do that kind of stuff. So, it is better than average.

I would prefer if they were not offshore, but they're offshore only for the first-level response. As you elevate or escalate higher up the chain, you come into the States where the guys are the actual developers of the software.

Its setup was really easy. They provide admin training, and that training is pretty comprehensive. Where you need to maybe go a little bit further would be to have some assistance with, depending on the application, some of the business rules that you need to write. You need to get the syntax correct, but once you do that, it becomes second nature.

I haven't been around pricing for a long time. Their model for what we have was totally different from what they have for their cloud applications. So, I don't even know what a cloud app costs at this point per person or per user.

For working with the mapping, the scripting, and the integration tool, it's good to have a consulting group that has done this before to work with you. 

The other side of it is that it is multidimensional. So, if your organization has never had this kind of environment or doesn't think along a multidimensional paradigm, then you should have a consulting group help you lay out what you're going to use the dimensions and the application for. Some are fixed. You have the months, the time periods, the years, and the currency, but there are also custom dimensions that you can use for various things. That affects how your data is produced and how you do your reporting.

I'd rate it a 10 out of 10. It is world-class software.

This solution has evolved in the last few years. We were using Hyperion, so there was data coming in from other systems into Hyperion. When we were using the on-premises system, we were just moving data from one ERP, e.g. Oracle ERP. When we moved Oracle Hyperion to the Cloud, we brought data from more than one system, e.g. we also brought data from SAP.

We use Oracle Hyperion for consolidation and everything's done on it, but in the past, we did our consolidation in Oracle ERP.

One of the best features that we use in Oracle Hyperion is the data integration. You can slice and dice data, and you can innovate, which is something you can't do in other ERP systems. This solution offers so many possibilities.

Workforce planning is also a valuable feature in this solution that gives you the option to bring in your HR data.

The reporting feature in Oracle Hyperion isn't the best. It needs improvement, but from what I know, they're offering a new reporting package.

There is a new reporting package available in the new tool module, but most companies, e.g. when I talk to friends and even people in my company, they prefer to use other packages like Power BI and Tableau. This means that data will come into Oracle Hyperion, then it will move out and go to Tableau or Power BI for reporting.

If this solution had a good reporting feature from the beginning, then I would have used it, and now that there is one, we don't have the tool. We don't have that license available. If it had been available from the beginning, it would have been great for companies, e.g. we would have been  able to better manage reporting.

I've been using Oracle Hyperion for 10 years.

It's a stable solution, and it has improved a lot in terms of connection. From what I understand, its algorithm is based on your input, usage, and frequency. Data availability has also improved a lot. It also depends on the data center, the domain name, and where the data center is located for your company. Other than the reporting, there aren't many complaints about Oracle Hyperion.

I find Oracle Hyperion scalable.

Oracle Hyperion is very easy to implement. Some pieces are complex, but it's an out of the box solution which works for most companies. It was designed in a way that you can maximize your requirement based on what is given by Oracle and they flesh this solution out every three months.

At the start, we deployed Oracle Hyperion on-premises, then we moved it to the Cloud. It's now deployed 100% on cloud. We are using its latest version.

What I'd like to tell others thinking about implementing Oracle Hyperion is that it's a very sophisticated tool, if used correctly. We've gone through a few mergers and doing the mergers, e.g. people coming from other companies merging with our company, they had experience with other tools. Not every company has Oracle Hyperion, and there were people from the other companies who were skeptics in the beginning as they had never used Oracle Hyperion.

When those people started using Oracle Hyperion, with the solution being something that needs a little time to get used to, e.g. you need to have a good understanding of how the hierarchy and the dimensions, etc. work, specifically for somebody who had not used it, or somebody who wasn't a power user, after the initial learning stage and after using it for a month, those people changed their minds about Oracle Hyperion. They said it was a better solution compared to what they used before the merger.

I'm rating Oracle Hyperion a nine out of ten. It's not a perfect score because it's a complicated tool which requires users to have knowledge on databases.

I'm giving it a high score as it is great for reporting and slicing and dicing of data where you can do a lot of calculations, allocations, and all kinds of things which you can't do in an ERP or any other tool. It would depend on how you use Oracle Hyperion. If you're not using it as much, then you won't be able to compare it with other solutions that are out in the market.