Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

Process costing.

Improved visibility into manufacturing.

Costing: very good, in-depth analysis.

Reporting.

Easy in implementation.

Maybe the contract, which is too complicated.

Six years.

None, but some issues with the Java launching.

Sometimes, yes.

It is good.

No.

No, none at all. We did start with two products, but it was not perfect in terms of integration.

Oracle licencing is very complex, and the pricing is too expensive .

No, it was strategic to go with Oracle.

Oracle has a low risk in implementation against all other products.

It is paperless; all of the human resources transactions, all of the travel expenses, all of the procurement. No paper; everything is done electronically. The process is more transparent, more accurate, very cost saving; then, high availability.

For ERP-wise, we would like to measure employee performance more; what projects they work on, how many hours they spend on each project, to provide employee performance metrics. I think something is missing there. We would like something like that.

I have been using it for two years.

We have some glitches. We have some application server memory issues that generate huge Java dump files. Then the workflow process is broken because the mail server goes down periodically.

Our company is a fairly small company; we only have 800 employees. We don’t think in the next five or 10 years that the growth will be phenomenal. That's why our current setup will be sufficient.

Support is very good. We also have a management service provider. We work with a company called Emtec that provides management services. Because our IT team is fairly small, we need extra help. They do a good job.

We didn't have a consolidated ERP system, so that's why we migrated to Oracle ERP. We had several small applications working together; the integration is really a challenge.

When we select working with a vendor such as Oracle, we like to choose the industry leader, because the company will be there for a long time. They have the reputation, they have the knowledge, they have the full suite. With some companies, one part of the product is very good, but they don't have the whole solution. We want a one-stop shop to solve all of our problems.

Initial setup is very, very good; straightforward.

When we implemented it, we used another company, AST. Their two-year contract has ended, which is why I chose Emtec. Overall, AST did a very good job. They do the job from scratch: so many app servers, so many test environments, dev environments, and production environment. We use Hyperion; we use BI; we use the EBS. That integration is very complex to understand, initially. Overall, we understand the whole thing.

I recommend Oracle’s E-Business Suite, of course; it’s a no-brainer.

The most valuable features for us are the abilities it provides for us to generate our financial statements and to develop our own customized reports exactly how we want. We've found it to be very, very good for a government entity or public-sector company. We do things a little differently from most private sector companies, and most EBS solutions, except for the Oracle product, are really focused more on private industry than public. So we really need that customization capability, and it's able to be customized for a functional-level user, which is ideal for our group.

I'd like to see the reporting improved. Right now, we do not own any of the hub or any of modules for financial reporting. We use this archaic thing called Discover. Discover is fine for a tech-finance person to handle, but a functional user doesn't understand it. It's not really used very well. The reports are not very pretty because we have to do a lot of extra formatting and publishing in order to do our annual reports. We actually have an additional outside system to do our annual reports. That's how bad it is.

We were early adopters. In 1998 is when they went to 11i and then they upgraded in 2012 to 12.1.3.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It has been consistently stable because when we implemented it, we basically kept it vanilla. We have no customizations, and it's fully supported by a hosted Oracle group. We didn't have to do much in that instance, because we kept it vanilla.

We're the city, so there's not much growth, it's more like volume of transactions. We are one of the largest cities, or the largest city, in Virginia, so we have a lot of transactional information that we have to do on a regular basis, and being able to track that in our unique, public-sector way is very important. They have been able to sustain us for this long, and we've been fairly content with it, but we have not taken any advantage of all the automation that could be used in that product.

One of the things is the timing is very, very slow for turnaround of most things. We get handed off to different people. We do not keep the same person who started researching the problem usually following up with us. We usually feel like we have to start over every time we get somebody new to figure out what's going on. If we had somebody from start to finish, we think we probably would have gotten resolution quicker and been able to keep that knowledge base of what's happened in the past. A group, or a smaller group of people, would have been more ideal.

The initial setup was simple and straightforward because we kept it vanilla with out-of-the-box functionalities.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

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.

For us, its value lies in the fact that it's an ERP solution our enterprise to manage the business well. Specifically, we have the core Financial Management module on our project which helps the business user analyze data. They have access to different types of analytics, such as general ledger, payables, receivables, and many others.

It has everything in one place. We can just access one piece of software for payables, GL, PO, projects, and everything just integrates together. It's helped us to reduce data entry because we can just enter data once and it's accessible from the other modules. It certainly reduces human intervention, which in turn saves time and, ultimately, money.

We seem to be constantly applying patches and updates to fix bugs. Oracle should really improve upon this issue, especially since it happens to frequently.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It's been stable, but we've got to constantly patch. I guess this is something we always have to do with Windows-based applications.

It's been scaling just fine for us.

The initial setup was very complex. Installing it is not bad, but it's configuring it that's difficult. It's getting the setup correct, and that's what takes time. It's company-specific, but we're pretty vanilla. Even with that, it still takes many months to upgrade. The documentation is there, but it might be helpful to have someone who's done this one or two times before.