Oracle Hyperion Reviews

Our clients mostly use Hyperion for their financial requirements, including budgeting, forecasting, and planning.

The feature that allows automation of the budgeting and forecasting process is extremely valuable, especially when compared to Excel. The workflow management of planning and the consolidation module are also helpful. All entity-level and country-level consolidations are automated with HFM.

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 use the forecast option, scenario modeling, and budgeting.

I am the one that builds the reports. So, it's the baseline for making any predictions for budgets and something like that. 

We are an international organization, so it helps us to have consolidated reports and a clearer overview.

It certainly supports streamlining across our global operations.

The integration of Hyperion into our existing system improved operational efficiency. 

I use the solution in my company for financial planning.

The tool's most valuable feature of the solution is flexibility and integration capabilities.

We use Oracle Hyperion for ad hoc querying and connection with multidimensional databases. It is very easy to use for combining dimensions of the database such as time, geography, and product dimensions. If the database is built as a multidimensional database, then Oracle Hyperion can handle all these dimensions and perform filtering and drilling as a deep-down tool in each dimension.

The platform is very easy to use from a user perspective, especially for nontechnical experts. The user interface is familiar and user-friendly for business users.

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.

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.

We used another product that was Excel based previously, but Planning is more on the web and lightweight, so you don’t have to worry about the Excel versions. It’s also centrally managed.

The biggest issue we have had for end users was that we lost control of functionality. Some of the problems we have had have since been fixed, but we are having issues with tabbing in all directions and scrolling through in ADF. They fixed this in a simplified interface, but it only lets you launch one application at a time. We cannot move to that interface because we are dependent on the shared workspace launching multiple planning applications.