Oracle Hyperion Reviews

My company is called ProfitFromERP. We help people select and implement ERP solutions. I don't personally use Hyperion day to day, but have clients who've selected and grown with the program. Hyperion historically has been a high-end tool for financial planning and analysis groups who want to create things like forecasting models and work with real-time data and events in-progress to update rolling forecasts.

Hyperion is useful for advanced financials, reconciliations, and other things that traditional accounting and reporting solutions don't do. Some people use it for their SEC reporting and things like that. Others are trying to compile data from multiple sources - various databases and transactional systems. 

For example, we've got hockey teams that cross-reference ticket data and information from third-party concession stands to get a complete picture of what's happening in their entire stadium. It provides them with real-time information from point of sale systems, Ticketmaster, and gate scanning systems, all so they can optimize staffing in every section and maximize revenues by having the right staff in the right place.

Hyperion has always been a top financial solution, but it had the reputation of being complex and not-so-easy to use. As with any complex & powerful program,  with the right training, users could really do some amazing things. In the early days, implementing Hyperion was complex, but implementing any enterprise software in the early days was complex. Experience was the key - if you had great consultants and a top FP&A team, it was a dream. If not, nightmare stories were the result. Today, with modern cloud-based systems everything is easier, not easy, but easier to implement. 

There's also been significant development around Hyperion. We've had clients look at Hyperion in ERP evaluations circa 2016 - and there were new cloud versions, but the functionality just wasn't there. One of the things we school our clients on is the rush to convert to the cloud has many software products with a two or three-year cloud history that initially look great, but later just don't have the breadth and depth of features. They'll look great in initial demos but later you find key requirements that it just won't handle. This can be a real problem - so we make sure our clients dig a little deeper. 

Fast forward to 2020-ish and all of the sudden we saw NetSuite clients choosing Hyperion, or at least seriously considering it. Technically, Oracle had launched a version called SuiteSuccess Planning & Budgeting and it was all based on the Hyperion Planning code. 

NetSuite has always had good base financials and really handy features like saved searches for repeated reporting. But when it comes to advanced financials, historically, most NetSuite resellers presented Adaptive Planning, which was so tightly integrated it appeared as just another module on the NetSuite home page. 

We also had Advanced Financials clients evaluating Host Analytics, Anaplan which started to emerge, Workiva, as well as BI tools like QlikView and Tableau.  One of the joys of cloud-based NetSuite was how tightly we could integrate with almost any other cloud-based tool. 

When Oracle brought NetSuite back into the fold via a $9B acquisition, of course, Larry Ellison was an early seed investor in NetSuite, but the merger brought NetSuite's cloud expertise and cloud market share and factored Oracle's massive development efforts to rapidly expand NetSuite's offerings in several ways. 

They launched that cloud version of Hyperion with the goal of becoming nearly plug-and-play integration with what NetSuite was doing. That's when our NetSuite client base began to really take another look. Plus some of the firms that had selected Adaptive back when it was sold as NetSuite Advanced Financials, those companies had really grown and what had fit well with a $400m company was hindering a $900m company. 

We had some clients who adopted Hyperion two years ago. 

Hyperion scales well because it has traditionally been available only to massive corporations. It was an expensive product. You only saw it with Oracle Fusion or other tier-one products that don't play in the mid-tier market. Oracle bought NetSuite. Technically, Larry Ellison owned 60 percent of the stock before, so it's hard to say that they bought it, but they brought it back in-house as an Oracle product.

NetSuite revolutionized the middle market for cloud software, and they were highly successful. Oracle started saying, "Well, you're not worldwide like our other products." The answer was, "We don't have versions for all those other countries. NetSuite's not for the bigger companies because it lacks all the features those companies need." 

Oracle put a lot of money into developing NetSuite to take it global. I went to a training class for their implementation methodology a year and a half ago, and there were 40 people in the class. Around five of them were based in the United States, and five were Oracle employees from one division or another. The rest were from Asia, Japan, Australia, Ireland, England, and France. It was a complete international group, which shows how much progress they've made in that direction. Many products that worked with the higher-tier Oracle software are being repurposed to work in the NetSuite arena.

That has given them more functionality to present to NetSuite, which has grown phenomenally. In 2018, NetSuite had 18,000 client companies.  They recently surpassed 33,000. That's phenomenal growth. Oracle invested tons into the development of a product that's already leading the market to open it up to more companies that need things like Hyperion and expand into countries so they can replicate the success they've had in the US. 

Our client base is comprised of companies moving from different solutions and switching for various reasons. Company growth, changing marketplaces, emerging cloud options, digital transformations, remote workforces, changing supply chains, direct e-commerce options, and even startups and companies approaching IPO and moving off accounting programs to full-fledged digital ERP-based operations. 

I've worked in the Sage channel, Epicor, and Microsoft - including Navision/AX, Infor's Lawson M3, so I've enjoyed a career dealing with local, regional, and national companies, and with some of the bigger ERP packages, international and global conglomerates. 

In every instance, knowing what clients face and what makes them need to change is critical to understand. 

At one point, we were working with pharma groups facing $3-5 million dollar SAP and Oracle implementations and we could recommend looking at Microsoft Dynamics AX in the $1.2m range. Years later, it's seeing NetSuite $500k systems instead of Dynamics $1m+. 

Today it's home-based workforces spending more on home furnishings, meaning home goods distributors need an e-commerce platform because no one is shopping in traditional furniture stores, as it's online. 

Aerospace is driving manufacturing efficiencies and handling supply chain issues differently than in the past. 

There are hundreds of factors driving business innovation in all sectors - Food & Bev that used to be packaged for restaurants now needs consumer pack-offs and new ways for consumers to buy online. Connecting with Amazon or Walmart distribution channels requires digital integration. 

The world has changed faster with the advent of made-for-cloud ERP. NetSuite, Intacct, Plex, Acumatica - it's all about finding easier-to-implement, lower-cost systems that fit client requirements. 

Keeping track of all the options, as well as knowing what the software publishers are doing with programs like Hyperion (or SuiteSuccess Planning & Budgeting) is key to letting our clients know what the up-and-coming options are. 

That said, if I go into a shop and their director of FP&A has been using Host Analytics or Adaptive, it's going to be challenging to get them to switch from a tool they know to Hyperion or anything else. In those cases, we build the integrations. It's so much easier to integrate cloud-to-cloud tools than it was 20 years ago, so it's not that big a deal. And if you've got somebody who knows another product in and out. They don't want to go through another six-month or nine-month learning curve to get proficient with another tool. 

We don't see people changing a lot, but there's sometimes a re-evaluation when a company starts growing and says, "We need to do more with our financials than we've been doing. We want to look at these FP&A solutions side by side. We want to see the advantages of one versus the other." 

Deploying Hyperion is much easier than you would think. It's relatively quick—about 60 days if you're running multiple databases. The scale of the implementation is way down. My clients are generally NetSuite, not Oracle Cloud or Oracle E-Business Suite. 

It's extraordinary compared to what we had seen in the past. In 2018, our impression was that Hyperion was not ready for prime time. We had done a couple of evaluations, and they quoted what the implementations would be. It was just like, "Oh my gosh. This is killing the project. It's too expensive." We were amazed at how affordable it had become in recent years, and the clients were pleased that they could get into a Hyperion-level tool at an affordable price. 

I listened to a CFO recently - his complaint was not being able to fully understand the costs associated with the project. They'd really done their homework, ran a super tight project management team, overcome huge implementation challenges, and successfully rolled this behemoth $900k ERP project out. It was six weeks late and $75k over budget and the entire reputation of the project within the company was that the project was a failure. 

Now by any realistic measure - getting a huge ERP project rolled out to a large company is not an easy lift. They were so close to the goal, yet perceived as a failed project, which is kind of devastating when you're in charge and demoralizing to the entire team. 

The truth is, you don't know what you don't know. 

One of the things that Profit From ERP preaches is changing the goalposts. Instead of an arbitrary go-live date, we focus more on goals like 'within 6 months after go-live we'll reduce inventory by 7%.' Now, instead of starting as a failure, we're working toward success. I know it sounds simple, but it changes perception, identifies steps toward goals, and measures progress - which the ERP is designed to do in the first place. 

Plus, having done hundreds of ERP implementations, our goal is to help negotiate licensing and implementation costs - but we also recognize there are hidden costs that will surface during implementation, staffing, and support changes - and we're having our client companies recognize that unseen costs and common and expected, so budget for them. 

I rate Oracle Hyperion nine out of 10. 

I work for an investment banking client. They use the solution to compute wealth-added numbers in Essbase. I get the data from different sources like Informatica, Upstream, and EDM. EDM is a kind of metadata management, and I get static data from EDM. In terms of data, I get the market values and transactions. I get the market data from EDM regarding tax information, unlevered beta, and all such parameter information.

From there, Oracle Hyperion will consume this data, run some calculations, and compute the wealth-added number, which has a certain formula. It all happens under lower granularity. Once the data has been loaded and calculated, it will be aggregated to the top level. Once the aggregation happens, users access the data using the Smart View Excel add-in.

They connect to the Essbase application using the Smart View Excel add-in and retrieve the data. Oracle Hyperion has the capability to hold data from the last ten years for historical analysis and retrieval purposes. The solution has a simple use case which is not very complex.

Oracle Hyperion is an advanced analytical calculation engine that can handle aggregation. From a user perspective, the solution can perform slice-and-dice operations and retrieve data. It is a traditional legacy application.

I mostly used Smart View, which does not have many great features compared to Qlik Sense. The solution's reporting and dashboards need improvement. Nowadays, all cloud technologies like Power BI and Qlik Sense can easily add new dimensions. However, doing the same in Oracle Hyperion is not simple and needs a lot of enhancements.

The licensing cost for the on-premises version of the solution is too high. Customers are nowadays moving to good solutions in the open system that offer less cost.

I have been using Oracle Hyperion for 14 years.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven to eight out of ten.

The solution's scalability is fine. One client from the investment banking industry was using the solution. In terms of increasing the number of applications, I rate the solution's scalability a six to seven out of ten. Regarding business requirements, complexity, and adding some new features, I would not recommend Oracle Hyperion to others. I rate Oracle Hyperion a four to five out of ten from this perspective.

Sometimes, the technical support is bad and takes a long time, but sometimes it is okay. If you want a patch from Oracle, they make you do different things, and sometimes you may not get concrete updates. I recently faced an issue where I was not able to download the patch from Oracle, and it was an issue with the portal.

I asked the technical support person to give me an alternative way to provide the patch manually, which he couldn't do because of their policy. I faced certain challenges. Other than that, I used to fix data issues, data failures, and environment issues without interacting with the technical support team.

I rate the solution's technical support a six to seven out of ten.

Neutral

The solution's deployment time depends on the complexity of the project. We need to develop an application based on the client's requirements. For on-premises, we already have an existing setup for Essbase. If we are looking for any version upgrade, we need to take the new VMs, install them, and configure them to the latest version of Oracle Hyperion Essbase.

Then, we need to migrate our applications. That's an upgrade project that will take around six months. This time may vary in the cloud environment. I am talking about the on-premises upgrade process, which involves moving an existing application to a different version. New development projects or small projects will take around six months, whereas bigger projects may take one year. It all depends on the kind of business requirements.

The licensing cost for the on-premises version of the solution is too high. Oracle Hyperion should upgrade itself by seeing how other products offer lower prices. Cost matters for an organization when setting up the complete environment. Whether companies want to use the product for bigger or smaller requirements, they have to pay the licensing costs based on the number of users.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a nine to ten out of ten.

I mostly use an Oracle Hyperion Essbase product, and the latest version I worked on is 11.2.11. Oracle Hyperion has operating and capital expense module features that will be helpful in budgeting. Any organization can use the solution's planning module to plan its budget for the next six months or one year based on current data and upcoming trends.

Overall, I rate the solution a five out of ten.

We use the solution for partition planning, HCM, and financial reporting. 

The tool is very scalable and powerful. It helps us with financial reporting and performance reporting. It is a very good tool for consolidation and budgeting. We are dependent on it for reporting. 

Integrating Oracle Hyperion, a multidimensional database, with relational databases poses challenges due to the differing database structures.

I have been using the product for 18 years. 

I rate the tool's stability an eight out of ten. My company has 15 users. 

Oracle Hyperion is very scalable. 

Oracle's support team is good. 

Oracle Hyperion's deployment is easy. Deployment needs technical expertise due to specific configurations. Its deployment may vary in complexity depending on the specific requirements and the organizational environment. Factors such as business needs and how well the tool aligns with those needs can influence the level of complexity in the deployment process.

The tool's deployment was handled by a consultant. Currently, we have an in-house team to manage configurations and change requests. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten. Based on my experience and market surveys, it is the best choice. 

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 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.

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.

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 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.