Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

The integration of the various, different modules within E-Business Suite is the key feature for us. For example, we use Payables, Assets, and GL, to name a few.

Because we're using out-of-the-box features, it's given us efficiencies in our operations. For instance, the way we use iExpress for paying invoices is an out-of-the-box functionality. We haven't had to customize anything, yet we've been highly successful in using it.

Oracle tends to be slower when it comes to bringing flashy functionalities than other, smaller entities can deliver. For us, we were eager to see a smartphone app, and now it's available and we're ready to implement it.

I learned from PeopleSoft that they already have OFAC as an engine within the product. EBS doesn't have it yet, and I wish they would because then I can integrate OFAC with my supplier database without a third-party tool.

We've been a user of Oracle since 1996.

We've never had any serious issues. There have been a couple of scenarios where we were told ahead of time of a change or update over a weekend and that we might experience issues because of it.

We've had no issues with instability.

It's scaled sufficiently for our needs.

Technical support has been good. We haven't had any problems with them.

The initial setup was complex from our perspective because we were new to all Oracle products at the time.

We ended up going with an outside firm to do our deployment of EBS. We just simply provided data at the time because we didn't know much about Oracle. Over time, we've become experts in some areas.

It's an expensive product, though worth it for larger businesses.

It's not intended for smaller entities because it's costly. For large organizations like ours, its ability to handle our data volume with stability is, for us, a perfect match.

The most valuable feature for us is that it gives us the ability to process the requisitions from our end users quickly, which is tied into all of our financials. It's given us a quick, easy, seamless process to do that.

E-Business Suite ties together many modules -- financials, procurement, HR, and many others. So that's the biggest benefit for us: it's just one platform. We don't have to deal with a lot of different external modules. They're all tied together neatly.

I wish that it was more public-sector friendly. It just seems like with the encumbrances, they slow down the process a little bit, and most public sector entities like us use encumbrance accounting.

In the private sector, invoices are paid when goods or services are received. However, in the public sector with encumbrance accounting, funds are reserved against the budget so that there are no overages. Once funds are committed, we've agreed to purchase goods or services without having already received them. Without encumbrance accounting, we wouldn't know whether a good or service has been received until after the invoice is paid and entered into the system.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

It's not 100% stable. As I'm a functional user, I notify IT to fix issues. Whether they do it or ask Oracle to do it, I'm not sure.

We haven't had any issues with scalability. For us, it seems to run at the same speed with the same functionality whether we have one user or a thousand.

I wish they would improve on it. For a functional user like me, technical support has been tough. With SR's, I've had to go back and forth. It seems like this is one area that hasn't improved in the ten years I've used Oracle. They have analyzers, but sometimes we just need help from Oracle support.

I was involved in the initial setup and had help along the way. The setups were easy for me, but I know that the technical portions of the install with our IT guys had some glitches.

We had third-party help in some regards, but then our DBA and our system admin knew most of the areas that we needed to for setup to convert from 11i to 12.1.

It's complex. In my opinion, it's similar to Apple products. It's complex in nature, and once you're on it you need to stay on it. Don't be afraid of the look and feel of it, because I've been on other products and although some of the other products look and feel a little bit better at the beginning, they are all buggy. They all have their issues, and I like Oracle products.

The business case around using the different Oracle products in this category generally comes down to the discussion regarding migration to the cloud. Specifically, Fusion would be migrating away from an on-premise-heavy environment to a subscription cloud environment. People are generally not looking at E-Business at the moment because of the push to the cloud. In certain countries where there are public sector rules regarding data sovereignty and data storage, they would look at E-Business as their solution because it can base critical data on-premises. From my vantage, everybody is moving to Fusion or should have moved to Fusion, but the fact is that some people still can not. Those who can not will use E-Business.  

I have seen companies that were making decisions based on excel spreadsheets move to making management decisions off the system data. Proper transformation through having a tier one ERP solution in place. 

The most valuable feature in E-Business Suite is the ability to have one source of the truth when it comes to data. This allows for decisions to be made in different disciplines but use the same data. Powerful.

I think the capability for deployment is not great when you get out of financials. That is, when you get to the edge products around the E-Business core, I think that needs improvement. For example, if you are in manufacturing and the core focus of your work is financial procurement and HR, I think E-Business is very good. When you get away from that focus and you get into the more specialized area of work, then EBS needs improvement. They are trying to fit everything into the cloud, but they are adopting pieces rather than adapting them to the cloud.  

One other improvement could be adopting more of the NetSuite total-business solution. I think that is a weakness that E-Business is really more like a module that connects things than a complete solution. I think that they should be looking at making it a total business solution.  

I have had experience with this product for the last 20 years.  

I think E-Business has the capacity to scale pretty well. Oracle is generally good for that aspect of product management.  

When I was on the support side, I thought it was great. I think where support does fall over sometimes is in the turn-around time and not from a technology perspective. The turn around can be too long.  

The initial setup for E-Business is pretty complex. I think that the difficulty is similar to implementing NetSuite as well. With NetSuite, you can get it up and running in three to four weeks for core financials. With Oracle, on the box, it says that it can be done with the setup rapidly and that may be true. But it is actually the internal change and adoption that are the biggest problems. In other words, I think that it is actually more of a problem as to how quickly business people can change rather than how difficult it is to deploy.  

I have implemented, supported, maintained, and looked after all of the different deployment types (on cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises).  

On a scale from one to ten there one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Oracle E-Business Suite as an eight-out-of-ten.  

I would recommend E-Business Suite to others who are looking into implementing it and sometimes do.  

The integration of the various modules is definitely the most valuable feature for us. Our clients being business-minded, which involves customers and suppliers. 

We pay bills and look to Oracle primarily for products which can integrate into our existing systems.

Due to the integration, we can just access just one software for AP, GL, PO, AR, and everything just integrates together. It has helped us to reduce data entry, because we can just enter data once and it is accessible from the other modules. It certainly reduces human intervention, which in turn saves time and, ultimately, money.

The issue of frequently applying patches and updates to fix bugs. Oracle should improve upon this issue, especially since it happens too frequently.

For Oracle R12.1.3, we have used it for a considerable length of time in most of the projects we support. We also have used other products, which are 12.2.4 and 12.2.5 for the last three years.

This product could be stable if there was a good support team supporting it. If there is a team of experts supporting it, you are guaranteed of its stability. Sometimes it becomes unstable, then a good support team jumps into it and makes it stable again.

It has been able to scale for our needs.

The support at Oracle is good. It is not very good, but okay. The Oracle support is through the Oracle MetaLink, where you open up the Oracle SR, then get the support needed. For this, we spend at least a day or two providing them with information and it is time consuming. Hence, I think it is okay. However, in case of any urgency, we need to go to the escalation route for any urgent support that is needed and need to go over the issue with them. We struggle in terms of getting the right support.

We used Oracle Applications 11i. The reason for switching is because we opted for the new release of r12, which had more advantageous features.

Initial setup really depends on the module. It is not very consistent, because different people have developed the different modules. You have to get used to it.

Oracle scales the pricing, but E-Business Suite is still very expensive for small to mid-sized businesses.

From the beginning, we were only using Oracle. It is not a small product; it is a big company. Going from Oracle to another vendor would be very costly. That's why they are not thinking about it. Maybe for the next five to 10 years, my company will be using only Oracle, but I am not completely sure.

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 is relevant to a successful implementation and actually using the products. It really helps if you have a solid performance assessment done prior to starting the implementation.

It matches with our requirements and pulls the data from an instance that is nowhere related to the Oracle Applications; it pulls out exactly what we require.

In one shot, we know what is happening. For example, if someone submits something from Salesforce, it immediately shows what the outcome. This data you can either transmit or not transmit. In this way, it is helping not only us but the customers as well.

We didn't go with the standard features of the Oracle SOA Suite in which the Oracle APIs were included; these APIs we wrote on our own. That might be the issue for us. If we had to use the standard ones, which were a part of the Oracle SOA Suite, it could have been better for us.

Rarely, we have experienced any downtime issues. That might be because of the DBS alerts that are missing.

It has scaled a little to our needs. I would give it a 6/10 rating for its scalability.

When we have to open a ticket with the technical support, it is resolved in a timely manner. However, for this purpose, we are not using the Oracle SOA support team; instead, we are using RemedyForce, which is a part of SFDC.

We did not look at any other solutions before because we got an analysis done by the Oracle team itself. They analyzed everything and recommended it to us.

I'm really happy with this product.

There is a new software called MuleSoft that has come up and is similar to this product. I want to review it to see if it is better than this one. I have heard it is more simple to deploy than the Oracle SOA Suite.

The integrations make it convenient for users as they only have one software package to take care of all their processes. I think that's important from a support perspective because it's like just one piece of software and we don't have to deal with different vendors. Support-wise, you don't want to talk to so many systems which interface between one vendor and another. If it's internally integrated, that saves us a lot of travel. A lot of times another problem happens during interface. Now we don't have to worry about those things with E-Business Suite and the full integrations of all the component modules.

It saves on cost, time, people, and human resources. It's just a very efficient solution for us.

We have some real difficulties with upgrades. Every time we perform an upgrade, we put a lot of effort into it. We perform a lot of testing, we bring in outside help, and then afterwards there's a lot of maintenance within the first few months of each upgrade.

Once we get past the difficulties and complexities of the upgrades, it deploys fine. We don't have any big issues with deployment after that.

It's a very stable product. We don't have issues with instability.

We see scalability issues when we use the Financial Statement Generator. We're in the process of moving to version 12.4, but we've had a lot of issues with FSG. With our data growing, we've seen performance deteriorating quickly. Some of the reports takes hours to generate, which, to me, is a scalability issue. We're hoping that the newer version resolves the issue, but that's yet to be seen.

Technical support is pretty good most of the time. Sometimes, though, I feel that they're throwing me the standard questions just to try and delay. I think those questions are unnecessary.

I do the setups in production, and afterwards, I'll do the support. It can be complex.

For me, technology-wise, it's great, and I would recommend it.

The extensibility that we've needed over the past several years is the most valuable feature for us.

It's allowed us to add our own customizations to it, which is highly important to our organization. We have many, many customized processes that we've needed to add on top of it in order to bring value to our company.

The complexity around configuration and deployment need improving. When I look at some of my previous companies, they spent millions of dollars on deployment and even just doing an upgrade. We did an upgrade two years ago and it took quite a bit of an investment just to upgrade as-is.

Deployment is complex and expensive.

Since we upgraded two years ago, it's been very stable. We haven't had any issues with instability since then.

There have been many times in which we could have used additional initial processing power, but we were constrained by the licensing structure we were in. That's prevented us from scaling to the extent we wanted.

We just dropped our maintenance with Oracle last year and have gone to a third-party service provider. It was less than half of the cost, and we didn't see the value of the money that we were spending at the time with Oracle.

I wasn't involved with the company that I'm at now, and it was definitely complex in the previous companies that I've been with.

The re-licensing is a large cost proposition so we may be looking at alternatives, I think, in the next couple of years.

I definitely think it's an investment. It's definitely a very robust product, so it's just going to depend on what type of investment a company is willing to make and what their future plans are as well.

Our primary uses are in our financial and manufacturing systems.

The most valuable features are the financial-related capabilities. 

The simplicity of the user experience needs to be improved tremendously.

The support and analytics features need to be improved.

I have been working with the Oracle E-Business Suite for 20 years.

From my perspective and from my experience with other solutions, I would say that the Oracle E-Business Suite is very scalable. There are approximately 150 users.

I would rate the Oracle technical support and eight out of ten. The quality of the solution and the speed in which they provide it are good, but not excellent.

This is a complex implementation. It took approximately eight months to deploy.

We have an in-house team of five engineers for maintenance.

Considering the market at the moment, Oracle needs to adjust the pricing of this solution.

Overall, this is a good product I totally recommend it. That said, there are some issues with the UX, analytics, and general complexity of it. It is very good from an executive perspective and a very good tool, but from the UX-perspective, it is old-fashioned.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.