Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

I am actually working in a services company and we are serving our customers Oracle E-Business Suite.

Some of our customers are moving to the deployment on cloud. In the past, it's been on-premise but some of them have moved to the cloud, whether it's for Oracle cloud or AWS cloud, people are trying to host it on the cloud.

The complete product suite is good. The financials are good, it is the best product I've been working with is Oracle Financial. Supply chain manufacturing is very comprehensive and the connectivity, between all the modules, is seamless. They are all communicated well with one another.

There are many new features that Oracle is providing.

In the cloud version of Oracle E-Business Suite, I think most of the features are already there. We are working on Oracle EBS SaaS applications as well, a lot of the improvements have already been made in the new modules that Oracle. The on-premise version could improve.

In the future, Oracle E-Business Suite could improve by having a better UI. Competitors are providing much better interfaces.

I have been using Oracle E-Business Suite for 15 years.

Oracle E-Business Suite is highly scalable. All Oracle solutions are highly scalable, whether it is on-premise or on the cloud.

The support from Oracle is excellent, they have always been good.

Our customers are also using customer support for their particular problems. My team is contacting the support and as a services partner, we are raising a lot of tickets from Oracle for any services we need or any certifications. Their response has always been good.

The initial setup time depends on the size of the implementation. In a medium-size business, the implementation could take between six months to one year to complete.

We implement this solution for our customers.

I have evaluated CX which is Oracle E-Business Suite's biggest competition. Workday is another competitor, and NetSuite is for medium companies.

I rate Oracle E-Business Suite on the Cloud an eight out of ten.

The solution is primarily used in our financial department. It makes financial operations easier to perform.

This is a stable product that performs well in our financial department.

It requires training before you can easily use this product, so it should be easier to use. It is of moderate difficulty; not very easy and not too hard, but training is needed.

The installation could be simplified.

We have been using Oracle E-Business Suite for ten years.

This solution is stable and we plan to continue using it.

This is a scalable product and we have approximately 100 users.

We have been in contact with Oracle support and have opened tickets with them. We are satisfied with the service.

The initial setup is complex.

We outsourced for the implementation.

The maintenance is being done by our in-house group of four people.

The license is very expensive and I think that it needs to be cheaper to get a wider range of users or customers. We pay for licensing on a yearly basis.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it for large businesses.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Oracle E-Business Suite is a corporate business product. It has financial, logistics, HR modules, et cetera. It contains lots of modules. Thanks to this, our clients can track all of their business needs with one platform. They can also design their own business needs using this product.

Within our organization, we also use Oracle E-Business Suite. However, we are only using a small part of it, mainly for financial purposes. We don't have any logistics issues. We are consultants: we don't buy and sell products, we don't have a warehouse, et cetera. Actually, all our call centers are onsite. From a company perspective, we have only five or six users, E-Business users. It's hard to give an exact number of how many clients of ours are using this solution, but if I had to estimate, I'd say roughly 10,000 users.

It's an all-in-one solution for corporate companies. There are lots of companies already using Oracle E-Business Suite as it can cover a wide variety of use cases. It's highly customizable. It's available as open-source. As it's open code, you can see what it's doing which makes it easier to customize things. These are the advantages of Oracle E-Business Suite compared to competitive products.

Some of my clients report that the overall ease of use could be simplified. The product still uses some old technology. Some of the modules have moved to new technologies like HTML, et cetera, but there are still old components and old sequence usages which bother my customers because they are not fancy and up-to-date. They're heavy-duty machines — they're not posh. They perform heavy-duty jobs. So users entering operational data, transactional data heavily, they love it; however, management-level doesn't like the screens because they don't look fancy.

I have been using this solution for roughly 18 years.

As it's a heavy machine, it's a very stable product.

Yes, it's scalable. You can technically increase its performance by adding servers, et cetera. So it's highly scalable. I have lots of customers — both big and small companies. Some of them have only two gigabytes of data and others have 32 terabytes. It works well for both types of clients because it can easily be scaled.

Support is a never-ending process because every day, our customers need to change things around. As such, customer support is never-ending. They ask for reports, or they need a new sequence, etc. So it's just a never-ending process.

We have an operational team for technical support. They don't work onsite, unlike the consultants. They are a team of six or seven people. They typically work in an office, but due to the pandemic, they work at home. 

Oracle Analytics is totally different from Oracle E-Business Suite because one of them is a reporting tool and the other one is just a generation tool. One of them has a sequence where you enter operational and transactional data using a sequence or integrations, et cetera. You collect data with Oracle E-Business Suite. And you use Oracle Analytics to repost them. So they are two different products.

Oracle Cloud is nice. With on-premise products, people usually emphasize the setup time. The main difference between cloud and on-premise products is you don't have to provide service and you don't have to scale your service according to your needs. When it's on the cloud, it's easy to scale.

Also, the cloud version of Oracle has new functionalities available. Oracle made an investment with the cloud version and they implemented customer needs and customer requests surrounding features that would benefit them — on the cloud, not on-premise.

So the cloud product is highly functional compared to the on-premise version. That's the main difference between the cloud and the on-premise solution.

Yeah, the initial setup is highly straightforward. It takes four or five days to install. Once we installed it, we made a copy and started using it. The first installation takes time — four or five days. Then, using the same installation, with cloning, it takes only one or two days, maximum. So it's easy to install.

Regarding a deployment team. It depends on the project. For instance, for a big-sized financial company, I need two or three financial consultants. If it's for a logistics company, I need, again, two or three logistic consultants. If it's for a small or mid-sized company, one consultant is enough to implement the project. However, these functional consultants, because they set up the system according to business needs, they need technical support. So we have a technical support team for customization, et cetera. Five or six technical consultants is good enough, usually. If there are lots of integrations, et cetera, I need a technical team of 10 people team.

Currently, we have three projects going on now. Two of them are upgrade projects and we have five consultants involved in each project. One of them is a scratch project, an implementation project. We have 15, 16, 17 people working on that project.

Licensing is on a yearly basis. There is an initial cost, and the standard fee is 22% per year. 

I would recommend Oracle E-Business Suite to other potential users. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

We expect some additional features, of course. We are located in Turkey and there are many tax legislation rules, et cetera. There are so many binding processes that make customizing this product for Turkish districts complicated. For instance, it's easy to customize products for Japan, Kuwait, and Germany because their tax rules are not very complex. But in Turkey, tax rules are really complex and change every month. The government changes everything all the time. Adapting the product to these changes is not easy.

The most valuable features are straight-through processing because we need to make sure that we have a good end-to-end process. The biggest thing that we also look for is the ability to easily research invoices, where you can attach to the specific invoice line item the detailed payments, etc. We look at it as our biggest factor.

It's important that we can constantly be able to monitor what we've spent relative to the government's money. We always make sure that we have everything in proper order since it is not our physical money. It is somebody else's.

We are an integrated contractor, which basically means that we are contracted by the United States government to operate a program specific to their needs, and to ensure that the program is spending their money correctly, and to make sure that we come in on-budget or even under-budget for the government. We would definitely need to ensure that whatever we do is very much in line with all of the government polices and regulations. We need to ensure that a software that we utilize adheres to that.

The biggest thing that we utilize EBS for is mainly Finance and HRMS. Those are our two biggest modules that we utilize within EBS. So we want to make sure that whatever we are utilizing it for will be easy for the employee to gain access to say, their HR data, or for our acquisition management department to be able to see where the invoice stands in the process of being paid. Those are just a couple of examples.

It is still a little outdated as far as what we consider a twenty-first century software. You're still using Oracle forms, that sort of thing. Payables is a prime example: there's the web interface and then the forms interface and we hate having to switch between the two areas. To create a simple report, at least in my opinion, sometimes requires a developer versus just me, as the user, going in and doing what I need to do. It's extremely difficult to do some data mining on a whim. If there's something repetitive in nature, then we can set it up with a developer, it works, but in our opinion we know that things could work better than the way they are currently.

We've really had no issues with deployment.

The current version that we're on, which is 12.2.4, is decently stable. However, the problem is that the system doesn't allow for us to have a lot of users on it. The hardware that we have is able to run beautifully when there's not a lot of people on. I equate it to, 'The machine's a Ferrari, you can't tow a boat with a Ferrari.' Essentially, the system will go fast when it's allowed to go fast, without the bogging down of users, but that's one of our problems right now. It seems to be that multiple users on the system have caused a lot of back-log.

So far, it seems like we can do a lot of things with EBS relative to customizations. We don't seem to have any real restriction in that area. But some things like, me as the cash manager, setting up banks tends to be a lot more cumbersome than it should be. There seems to be a lot more involvement with doing those types of basic things than they should be in the real-world sense. It seems to be a little bit more like it was geared towards a developer to set up the bank rather than a professional.

Since I'm not the support side of things in the organization, I don't directly deal with technical support, but there are people, such as DBAs and developers, who have been in talks with Oracle about some of the issues. They didn't seem like they had any real problems other than some of the solutions are a little slow to come about. It could be because our organization is very unique, some of the solutions that might need to happen could be a little bit more involved with trying to develop a solution that we need. I don't think we've had a situation, however, where we weren't able to get the needed support.

I wasn't actually at the company at the time, but for upgrades for which I've been apart, they did seem to be a little bit more difficult. A lot of it could be on our end, mainly because of how we do a lot of customizations. We had to do these customizations, unfortunately, because E-Business Suite didn't allow for a specific industry like ours to have more to an 'out-of-the-box'-type of developed software. There was a lot of customization. Now, they have improved from version to version, but for our business, we're still very much away from being cloud-based. Our software sits on a non-internet network. It really is hard for us as an organization to sometimes do business in the environment of, 'Everyone wants to move to an internet system', i.e. the cloud. There are organizations such as ours that have trouble at this point being on an internet-based system.

With our customizations, it stopped a lot of the upgrade that we just had last year. When we did the upgrade, a lot of these customizations were a constant battle where one would not work, another would work, and then when you'd fix one, something else would happen. There were a lot of issues, which we are, as an organization, trying to pull away from customizations. Oracle has not really been geared a lot towards what our line of business was. We have to do a lot of customizations in order to allow for that software to work as we need.

Minimize your customizations if you can. If not, get a lot of training because a lot of the screens are not as intuitive. I'm kind of a rare breed, I guess, as I do have some 'IT sense', so I can maneuver through screens, but when it comes to other people in my group who are really not 'IT minded' at all, they're usually asking me for help when there are some set-ups in their own modules. Setting up is the biggest key, and if you mess that up it's going to propagate the rest of your EBS experience, so you need to have a proper set-up.

The most valuable feature is mostly the integration process that connects to a lot of our backend systems, such as manufacturing and other processes that do payroll, HR, and those things. There's a kind of integrated solution system.

It is a single-point solution, where we use one application that connects to a lot of systems, as opposed to trying to buy multiple best-of-breed systems or integrating them together; instead of having a lot of features in one system. It is easy for us to maintain and support the system, as well.

I would like to see more connections with the third-party application, such as banks and credit card companies. They could develop a seamless integration. Right now, we use batch processing for sharing the data that comes out of a file system. We would like to have that online connection, a real-time connection, where you can go and pull the data whenever you want.

We've been using it for five or six years now.

Stability is great.

We have had some patching issues, but at the end of the day, once we patch it out, and we bring up the applied solution, it works.

I would not see scalability as an issue, but we are not a large company, as such. We have around 2,000-plus employees at the company, but we do run all kinds of applications on it. It's pretty decent. We have not had any issues.

We worked with Oracle On Demand and with support. Most of the time, they are great. Because we are a support customer, we have a big advantage there. They are responsible for managing our systems. We go with them, and log whatever the technical request there. Most of the time, we get resolutions fast.

We were initially a start-up company. We looked at Oracle, but initially, for a start up company, Oracle is not the most suitable option, but we know that our company is going to grow, so the solution had to scalable. We chose Oracle because it has the most scalability for us to go and do that.

Initial setup was complex because it extends to a lot of our applications’ integration points. Once you find out the solution, what to do then, the next time, it kind of streamlines the process.

When we were making the decision, we looked at a lot of other companies such as NetSuite and PeopleSoft. Given the Oracle presence and a lot of technology support available in the Bay Area, and being a company in the Bay Area, we chose Oracle as the best product for us to go with.

Look into the Oracle product and see if it will satisfy your requirements. Then, instead of buying 10 different products and integrating them, maybe you'll see that a product provides 80% of those benefits; go with that product, which I think Oracle does.

The most important criteria when I’m choosing a vendor such as Oracle is knowing that when new products come out, they will increase our company’s efficiency in terms of managing scalability, see that we can run these applications, and maybe they will help us increase sales and productivity. That's what we look for in most of them.

They are continuously improving the products, making sure they are staying with the competitors to make sure that they are following the industry standards and bringing customers up to speed so that we can use industry leaders.

The most valuable feature for us is integrity in the sense that the General Ledger module is directed connected with our payables. And our Human Resources is connected with payroll, so it's one unit from HR's perspective, which is very efficient. Also now, we have the iRecruitment module, so it's a single continuum from HR to finance. We don't have to deal with different software.

Another important aspect for us is safety in the marketplace. We know it's not going to go away and that our investment in the solution is OK.

I mainly support human capital solutions, so the biggest benefit for me has been with the iRecruitment module that took very paper-driven tasks to just a few clicks. It's saved me a lot of time and provided connections between tons of separate interfaces.

iRecruitment is, however, a very weak module that gets a lot of user complaints. And even though we get good responses from Oracle Support, it's really clunky and is one of the weakest module that I think Oracle has.

We also didn't like the Time and Labor module. We replaced it with Chronos, and that's made a big difference.

I've been using it since 1999. Back then, we used only basic applications such as Payables/Receivables, Ledger Projects, HR, and payroll. We went with iProcurement in 2005 and then iRecruitment in 2006.

The issues with deployment depend on which modules are deployed as well.

We've had no issues with instability.

We've been able to scale for our needs.

The TARs assigned to us have improved a lot over the years. They have a lot of scripts that can be registered as concurrent. Previously in 1999, I'd have to think twice before logging a ticket because it was a back-and-forth nightmare. Now we can chat online very quickly.

As a developer, I have no power or decision in the selection process. But I think it was market presence and the stability that won over management. We purchased PeopleSoft before Oracle acquired them, and after they did, our whole organization uses Oracle now.

I think that the initial setup is complex, especially since we were unfamiliar with the software. We were talking to consultants who were unable to relate to us. We were coming from a mainframe world and a lot of our decisions were wrong. I don't fault Oracle for that, though. It's just part of any implementation.

Getting the right consultant is key, and sometimes rapid implementation doesn't pay.

I'm an Oracle die-hard, but I think that iRecruitment and Time & Labor are very weak.

It's a very comprehensive solution that enables us to manage customers, customer service, finances, projects, HR, and other business operations. It adds a lot of value for us because it gives us solutions to all these areas.

There are a couple of areas for improvement, I think, which are implementation via the cloud and they need to bring down the price. Cloud implementation would make it much easier to begin, and the price is a little high.

We didn't have any issues with deployment, but, again, it would be better if we could implement that solutions via the cloud.

It's a very stable product. We haven't had any issues with instability.

It is very scalable and we've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

The technical support personnel are knowledgable, but I feel they're too aggressive and kind of pushy.

E-Business Suit setup was complex, but I think that every Oracle product has a complex setup. It wasn't easy and it wasn't straightforward. In fact, it took us one to two years to complete the setup.

Oracle scales the pricing, but E-Business Suite is still very expensive for small to mid-sized businesses. I heard that this is a common complaint throughout the market for these sorts of solutions.

Make sure that you have a very solid project management plan prior to implementing it. Be sure to assess your timeline, duration, and everything else that's relevant to successful implementation and actually using the products. It really, really helps if you have a solid assessment performance done prior to starting the implementation.

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.