Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

Valuable features include expense management and the accounting suite of products.

It has improved our efficiency and time to market.

I would like to see more automation.

There were no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

We used a home-grown solution.

The setup was moderate.

We implemented through an SI.

The ROI has yet to be calculated.

Be careful.

We evaluated SAP.

It is better to work out the requirements properly and minimize the customizations.

Being able to get all the financial data into one system that talks to each other and get our financials published every month.

We've been on it for so long that it's hard to think.

The mobile apps, I think, are the up and coming thing for us. To make it easier for people to do things on the go. I know that they do have a bunch of them but, in a lot of cases, you can only view information on a lot of the mobile apps. Like you can't action on any of them. I think with procurement you can't create requisitions on the mobile app. You can just see the status of them.

Oracle Alerts is kind of a forgotten application and it's great for just sending users notifications about the status of things. It's much easier than learning WorkFlow so we still use it a lot. It used to be that when email was character based you'd send out the email and everything looked great. Now when you send out an email and you try to put stuff in columns it's just clear text so the columns don't line up. They've never added the feature to be able to send the email in HTML format. That would be nice to just, I mean, it's not a big thing and it hasn't changed a lot but it would make life a little simpler.

We've been a customer for over 20 years.

We've had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Pretty good. We're pretty satisfied. If we raise something to a P1 they work on it 24/7. We don't have any issues with that. We don't raise a lot of problems because there aren't that many problems anymore. We keep our customizations down to a minimum.

I wasn't involved in the initial set up. I was involved in all the upgrades thereafter. They vary, some were great some were pretty straightforward others were problems all the way along. Their migration paths, they've gotten better over the years so they're not quite as bad.

I would say look at your processes and your internal procedures and see if you can modify those as opposed to trying to customize the application to fit what you currently do.

The integration of all the various modules is definitely the most valuable feature for us. We're a business outfit, so we have customers, we pay bills, and we look to Oracle primarily for products that can integrate into our existing system. If it doesn't, we look at something else, but we always start with Oracle first.

We use the billing module heavily. In fact, one of the things I was looking for were some of the new features in 12.2.4, which which include federal billing features. That's really going to be helpful for us and that's what we're upgrading to right now because we've had to have customizations before. We're hoping that the inherent functionality that we'll be upgrading to will allow us to drop some of our customizations. We try to keep our Oracle as vanilla as possible, so having those enhanced features is something that we're really looking forward to.

For simplicity's sake, we like to cut down on the number of interfaces that we need. It makes upgrading easier because of the integration and it helps me to oversee things from a functional perspective. We are doing an upgrade right now, but it also makes it easier to plan for your upgrades and to follow through on those plans.

We have project contracts for government customers, and that has been a little bit tougher to implement, because I don't think Oracle has a lot of clients on that. We implemented that about two or three years ago, but we haven't found a lot of people who are using it. What I'd like to see is not necessarily something in the functionality of the software, but rather a way to meet some of the other customers who are using the product, which would be helpful.

Also, we would like to do more with iExpense. We use iExpense right now for purchasing cards, but we do not use it for employee vouchers. I think we cannot use it two ways at the same time. We're using it right now for the purchasing cards, but we don't use it for employee vouchers. I think we would like to have more functionality in that area.

We've had it for twenty years, so it predates my tenure there. We're really simple; we are one legal entity, one operating unit, one ledger. We are embarking right now on implementing Multi-Currency as we do have some international business. We probably are going to do more with multi-org in the future, but we haven't started that yet. It's called Multi-Org, but it's not a module, it's just functionality. For example, we right now have one legal entity in the US. We just opened our office in Singapore, so if we have a need to establish a separate set of books for them, then that would be Multi-Org and we'd set up a new set of books for Singapore. But right now have everything in one US ledger.

I've been there six years and the only big thing we've really implemented is Project Contracts. Actually, we did hire an outside consultant, because that product is quite specialized. I don't recall there being any big issues with deploying that.

It's very stable. There's a little bit of bugginess in the billing area, but generally, because we've had it for so long, we've worked out a lot of our issues.

I think we still have enterprise licensing, for the most part, so it's easy to scale.

For one thing, we do a lot of work with the federal government, but the federal government isn't the federal government. It depends on which piece of the federal government you work with. Each of your customers in the government have different requirements and you really do have to do some customizations around billing. Because we have all these different federal government customers, some of them want the bills uploaded into a certain system that they have to process their bills, or they want the bills to be in a certain format and your other government customers don't need it in that format. We do a lot of things based on the customers’ needs, but I think the functionality in this next release is taking some of those considerations and putting them in the software, so they're there already. So the 10-34's and 10-35's that the government requires, their putting that into the Oracle functionality, whereas before we had to make those on our own.

It takes us a while, but we do things very methodically. We have not typically had outside consultants and we typically do our own upgrades. I think that that's a good thing.

I would advise potential user that, if they're implementing from scratch, to really, really learn the product before they implement. Oracle is known for certain decisions you make where you come to a point to either turn right or left, and if you turn right you can't decide later to turn left. I think some people try to slam things in and take short cuts, but I've done implementations in two different companies, and I've found that doing the slow and methodical approach and really planning it out is the best way to go.

I like the fact that it encompasses our whole business: everywhere from our manufacturing to our supply chain, our order cache, our whole financials -- just everything.

I like how it's standardized across our organization. We don't have one user with a different experience with a different system. It's got the same look and feel all over. You learn to use Oracle in one area, you can easily learn if you change positions. That's one nice thing off the top of my head.

I think it would be nice to see some streamlining of the process. There's a lot of screens to go through, a lot of levels to get down to. I see that in purchasing, I see it in accounts payable, and even AR to a degree. Sales orders is another one. When entering transactions, there are multiple tabs and multiple levels, so you can kind of get lost, especially for our new users. It's not so intuitive.

I've been working with Oracle for almost 20 years now.

Ours is pretty stable, and it pretty much has been from day one.

We haven't really grown all that much as far as users or transactions that go through. It's been pretty steady, so we haven't needed it to grow by leaps and bounds. As years go on, we're getting more and more transactions in there. When you go and search something, it's been able to keep up with all of that.

There have been years where it's not so good. Honestly, in these last 5-6 years, it's been pretty solid. I've always been able to open a ticket, and if I can't find the answer myself in my Oracle support, then the ticket gets resolved fairly quickly and to a resolution, so that's nice.

I think one of the things is having Oracle in your organization requires a deep check book. It's a lot of money, and it continues to be a lot of money over the years. It's a big long-term investment.

It takes a lot of staff to run it. Not only do you have your Oracle staff that supports it, depending on your organization that can be anywhere from 2 to 10 people, it also includes your departments as well. Your AR, your accounts payable, and all of your finance and cost management and all of those people are required. It takes a good staff to make it work.

The most valuable feature is the data availability across the enterprise from sales to manufacturing to distribution. There's also the dashboard plus it just eliminates the silos within the company. We used to have sales that operated without giving consideration to what their decisions meant to manufacturing, what an event did to the visibility and interaction. But now, all departments are able to see the effects of their decisions on other departments.

It's increased the speed with which we can get things done. Having that visibility of data between functional areas lets us react quicker, and lets us satisfy our customer needs quicker.

I'd like to see more mobile functionality, as well as a lot more manufacturing shop floor control. I don't want to have to record information that a machine is already recording.

We're mostly happy with it. The stability issues that we have are based more on operating systems, I think, than ERP systems. Our Microsoft SQL servers have to be rebooted and the ERP system is not available, but it's not the fault of the ERP system as much as it is a Microsoft product issue.

We've had good success with scalability. We haven't had much issue with it.

We partner with a consulting firm, so all of our help desk tickets go through them. We don't deal with Oracle directly.

It took about a year and was a painful process. I would never want to do it again, but we went from a system we used for 30 years to something much more dynamic and new.

We partnered with a consulting firm, and we came in on time and under budget. Can't ask for much better than that.

An Oracle solution wasn't our first as we selected a different solution. We failed in that implementation, and Oracle was our number two choice. We purchased the first choice and we failed, so after that we regrouped, we re-evaluated again. Oracle was again in the top three so we gave them a try.

What I learned is that we needed to get that solution in to run our business and then be open to the fact that neither we nor our implementation partner knew our business, so we ended up with a vanilla installation that would run our business. Then knowing that we had work in the future to do, we as a company learned Oracle and how to utilize it to fit our business.

Don't expect to put in a hundred-percent functional, whiz-bang ERP system the first time, but know that you would have a vanilla solution that you have to grow and help mature over a course of years.

The best feature is that EBS provides a look and feel that's easy for our functional users. We use it for our financials, and the intuitiveness of the solution is very good.

We've seen a lot more cohesiveness in our organization since we started using EBS. Our work blends together well with is and it's not so fragmented anymore. There's definitely been an increase in the efficiency of our man-hours, as well as a reduction in the amount of time we need to manage the financials.

The product is pretty good, but it incorporates both old forms and new HTML/Java-based pages. I'd really like to see Oracle move away from the old forms entirely and go with the new. Currently, there are certain things, like entering a purchase order, that you can do in either the new or old way, and they each work in completely differently. And, sometimes there are bugs in one that's not present in the other. I'd like to see an across-the-board transition to the new pages.

We were early adopters and have been using it for over 10 years. It's constantly evolving, which is nice.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

It's pretty stable as we keep up with the latest and greatest versions. My boss is really big on patching and upgrading.

It is pretty scalable. Right now, we're doing iExpense and iAsset, so we're always building upon it.

The level of technical support depends on who you get. Sometimes they'll lag along and we have to keep prodding them and babysit the ticket. Sometimes I'll have to get my boss on the thine to scream at them. Other times, they're really responsive. So it varies.

The complexity of the setup depends on what we're doing. When we upgraded to R12, the setup was painful. It depends also on consultants, functional leads, and others involved. So the setup is not just about the product itself. Also, because we were early adopters, we experienced a lot of bugs that hadn't yet been worked out, and some of the consulting at that time wasn't the greatest.

We implemented it with a combination of our in-house team and outside consultants.

My main piece of advice is to make sure you have all your testing scripts. Make sure your functional users test before implementation.

As the brand name says, Enterprise Resource Planning, and that's all. It offers integration for all business areas in one database.

I would like to see improvement in the overall UI.

We have been using this for more than 20 years.

Technical support is fair.

The most valuable feature is its ability to give us real-time information.

Of course, we'd like to see those reports re-introduced. Right now, we have more reports for the general ledger module. We would like more reports for the other modules: fixed assets, AP, revenue, and so on. That's where the problem is.

I have been using it since 1997, 19 years.

It has not been consistently stable. One time, when they did an upgrade to R12, it messed up some of our reports. That's why we went to GL Wand for some of our reporting solutions.

We’re still using this solution day-to-day. We're still sticking with it, of course. We just kind of make do with what we have right now.

Technical support has been fine. We haven't had any problems. Whenever we’ve had a hiccup or something, there's always been a representative to help us. They're knowledgeable and the response time is okay.

The initial upgrade, as I’ve mentioned, took away some of our valuable reports that were in the original Oracle EBS. That was really annoying.

The other thing was that, when we did the upgrade, it brought up some bad data from prior years. It took a few years to figure out what was going on. It still, even to this day, four years later, still pops up information from 10 or 11 years ago. Luckily, we're not a big, big company; we're just a local government.

Right now, we kind of solved our reporting issues in the general ledger part with GL Wand, or Excel4apps, but we're still trying to figure out the other modules through custom reporting. It’s taken time. I really wouldn’t have an answer for anybody.

I like to work with vendors who have a good reputation and good customer support.