Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

We use this product for the management of purchasing, accounts payable, general ledger accounting, and other things. TheyHyperion software is good for management as well as processes such as accounts receivable. The product has many use cases. I'm an applications consultant and we are service providers and Oracle customers. 

It has improved our organization by enabling us to move from manual to automatic processes. It means that our clients can focus on analysis instead of transactions and dealing with a lot of paperwork. Transactions can now be approved by mobile or when you're on the road. The approval workflow has improved significantly. 

The new Subledger Accounting feature is very strong. It's the most powerful thing Oracle has done in this latest upgrade. We can easily customize which is something that wasn't easy with the SaaS product. With an Oracle database and application, everything is integrated into one solution from one provider. The entire process is now integrated. Because we use Excel and Outlook a lot, there's no need to log off and on, it's all integrated. It's transparent for the end user, which is good. Oracle implemented OTBI, which saves the need to print reports. Everything is available as you go and on the go, which is a good feature. It's great for analysis. 

The implementation can take some time and it's one of the difficulties with Oracle as compared to SAP. Deployment takes way too much time.

I've used this solution for 20 years. 

The solution is scalable. We have around 400 users in the company which includes finance people, supply chain staff, and management.

The technical support is responsive and have helped us apply patches or find solutions when we have bugs.

Positive

The initial setup is a bit complex. The EBS takes more than 12 months to implement from scratch. We're a team that carry out deployments as well as provide service and support for our customers. We have a team made up of architects, project managers, consultants, functional analyst developers, DBAs, close to 20 people in total.

We have to invest a lot but we get a good return. 

They have licensing models based on the number of users as well as one-time packages. If you're on the cloud, it's pay-as-you-go. It's not cheap technology but they have good consultants who know all the features. They are one of the longest-standing players in the market so they can dictate the price.

My recommendation is to not customize E-Business Suite. The upgrades are complicated and when you go from version to version, it's not a good thing. You have to spend a lot of money so if you're already doing that you might as well go for a product that satisfies your requirements. If an organization has the opportunity to go to the cloud, then it's worth doing. It's pay-as-you-go, you're free from DBAs and a lot of complicated processes, and everything is taken care of in the cloud, 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

I primarily use the solution for the financial aspect.

The workflow on offer is great.

I appreciate the alerts.

The technical ability to run runtime APIs is great. The web services and APIs are very powerful.

We found the initial setup process to be very straightforward.

You can scale this product easily.

Technical support has always been very reliable. 

The pricing is reasonable. 

Sometimes I have issues with the performance tuning. There is not much help there. There have been many times where I have had performance problems if there are high volume loads.

There is some lack of functionality, specific tools, and certain ways of doing business. The business process and Oracle capabilities occasionally fall short so we have to customize many, many, many things. The depth of functionality is not that great for some niche business processes, like distribution or warehouse management. Due to this, we have to go for an outside business product, a specialized product.

One major thing we found was there are no user interfaces for corrections. If we have a lot of integrations, then error handling and correction management are very manual and we had to build a lot of user interfaces to do that. They should allow a proper framework for integration building on the E-Business Suite. In the cloud, it may be better, however, a lot of it is left to clients to do customer development. Out-of-the-box integration supports are very limited, particularly transactions and error handling and re-submission, reporting, et cetera.

I've been dealing with the solution for 20 years. It's been a while. 

E-Business Suite is easy to scale. We run a global organization with $35 billion on financials on it. It's pretty solid.

Average daily users are around 600, however, registered users are almost 3,000. Not everybody uses it every day, so about 600 people are logged in every day. They would be different people. Registered authorized users include suppliers as well.

Oracle is the only company I can count on for support. They always do a great job.

The setup was very straightforward. Now, it's well documented and we can import setups. It's nothing to worry about.

I can't speak to the exact pricing, however, I've always found it to be reasonable.

We have a partnership. We do develop products together with Oracle.

The version we are using is about two or three years old. It's not the latest.

If you do work in advance and re-engineer the process really, even E-Business Suite implementation is faster with a process engineer. Don't allow too much creativity and too many custom requirements as most of the time the requirements are standard. People in the job want to do more things than they should. Re-look at the processes before mapping. That exercise should be done in parallel to implementation.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for order management, bills of materials, work in progress, and finance. I take care of the infrastructure in the Oracle apps. We're a customer of Oracle and I'm a system analyst.

Oracle has always been known for its finance modules and that is definitely a valuable feature. From the back-end, Oracle has been the leader forever. Also from a functional perspective, it provides us with great customization which I'm not sure is available in most of the other ERPs. In that sense it provides a great level of flexibility.

Oracle has always had one drawback and that is that it's not as user friendly as it's competitors, whether from the database perspective or switching from SAP to Oracle. The amount of administrative effort required for SAP is far less than that required for Oracle where the administration part is very tight and can be a bit of a headache. With SAP, the number of patches, bug fixes or interim upgrades are far less than Oracle which releases a lot of patches for bugs. As a head-on comparison, you get the feeling that SAP is a far more stable product. The bottom line is that the administration of the database and the application could be improved. 

There are many additional features I'd like to see. From an automation perspective, things could be improved. If you compare it with many of the competitors' products, the markets associated patent technology is highly competitive. Most other solutions are very user friendly and have such rich experience in the user interface that I think a holistic approach towards making Oracle more user friendly and usable is something I'd like to see.

I've been using this solution for about 10 years. 

It's a stable solution but Oracle releases security patches every quarter, so you need to apply them and then there are additional bug fixes with respect to the business center. The solution doesn't crash and there's no unpredictability in behavior. There's no performance issue. It's very robust when it comes to overall setup. 

Scalability has improved recently because of the many interfaces that Oracle has and many other products that it can integrate with. Even in Identity Access Manager, it has its own products. So in that sense, it's improved a lot on its scalability.

The support is good. Oracle has a global presence when it comes to support so depending on the timezone, the quality of support might vary. My experience with the Middle East is not great but when it comes to Europe, they are good. From Asia, specifically India, it can be two extremes. In general, support is good. 

The previous company that I worked for had its own ERP.  The switch to Oracle was made because it's a bigger brand with a wide array of products. Oracle is into database within application and it has a number of modules. In addition to Identity and Access Management, it has the WebLogic, SOA and its own server storage's operating system. 

The initial setup takes three or four people. One is the DBA, one is the technical guy and then we have the functional person which could be two roles; one for testing the application for its functional gain, the business process etc., and the other, who does the setups and support work. Within our company we would have more than 100 users of this product. 

Deployment is more complicated and challenging than you'd find in comparable solutions. We normally have multiple iterations for the deployment. One iteration from a DBA perspective normally takes a few days but then there's the functional part, technical part. I expect it would take two to three weeks for that.

If it's just installation of the ERP then you're looking at a few days but you need to consider the environment, amount of customization, functionality, etc. That takes about three weeks because it involves testing, functional setups, technical setups, and the DBA.

The licensing costs for E-business Suite depends upon what modules you're using, the number of users, core database components and things like that. I believe we pay around USD $100,000 annually. There are no additional costs unless you opt for additional products or components.

I briefly thought about evaluation other options, but it didn't happen because I'd already had some experience with Oracle. 

For someone who has never used Oracle, I would tell them that it's not a user-friendly application, so it takes time to get your head around it. On top of that, Oracle is mostly done in Linux and Unix which is completely command-based so from an administration perspective, it's helpful to have some experience and knowledge because it's not a walk in the park. 

Landscapes change and so do the products and services. With that perspective in mind, I would say that although Oracle is a very robust technology and a leader in certain areas, it takes time to adapt to it. Other technologies are far easier to implement but perhaps the complexity makes the job more secure and challenging.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We use the solution in a variety of ways via modules. There are parts for employees and other areas for services. On top of that, we have modules for supply chains. We have modules for human resource management, and financial as well as for retail and inventory.

The solution has helped the organization in a multitude of ways. For example, it has really helped with the way we manage retail orders. The automation of retail and dealer order management has helped us a lot. It is one big use case that's a good example of the transformation that's possible with this product. Previously, the order management was manual. Currently, it has been automated to such a degree that a dealer can simply go to a portal, and actually make a payment. The payment reflects right in the system. After making the payment in the system, the dealer is able to make an order. Within a matter of 10 to 20 minutes, he has his stock. There's an integration between the dealer self-service system to the ERP to inventory and even to the warehouse. Everything surrounding that is fully automated, thanks to Oracle Release 12.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the employee self-service.

The order management is excellent.

I would say the integration needs improvement. Oracle needs to work on the integration layer to make the solution much more robust and modern.

The solution needs full cloud netting.

I've been using the solution since I joined the company. It's been about seven or so years now.

The solution is stable. So far we've not had a priority one or priority two incidence from Oracle E-Business. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. So far so good. I'd describe it as reliable at this point.

The scalability of the solution is good. If a company needs to expand the solution, they should be able to do so.

Our company has between 5,000 to 10,000 users if you factor in the dealers and the employees together. Our average employee count is 6,000. That's employees alone. On top of that, we have dealers who are around 3,000. Adding both groups together, you are looking at somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 users.

The solution technically is supported well both from Oracle, who is the owner of the solution, and IBM, who is the integrator. I cannot complain. So far, we're quite satisfied with the technical support offered by both companies.

When I joined, the company was on a previous version of Oracle. One of the first tasks I handled when I joined I was to head up the upgrade project. It's a solution that's been used from the beginning, or, at least that's my understanding.

I wouldn't describe the initial setup as straightforward. It's very complex. Even Oracle themselves would say that this solution has the most complex implementation of their products. It might even be one of the most complex in the world.

Deployment took almost one year. This was due to the fact that the analysis design alone took almost six to seven months. Implementation and testing alone took another five or so months. 

We used an integrator and a consultant to assist us in the implementation. The consultants were from Oracle and the integrator was IBM. We needed them both due to the complex nature of the setup.

Our relationship with Oracle is simplly one of supplier-customer relations.

This solution is deployed in our organization on credit in two sides active-active.

What I would tell other companies considering the solution is this: first, they need to know that it is an expensive solution. It's very expensive and therefore could only be affordable for companies that have a given level of revenue. 

Beyond that, I would say Oracle needs to be a fit for future use in terms of being cloud-native. Organizations should ensure their solution can run on other public cloud providers other than Oracle themselves. They need to have their permission that it can be deployed in AWS or Azure or Google. Right now, the cloud version that they have most likely locks to Oracle cloud itself and they just need to be aware they need the option and flexibility.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

I love SLA because it gives me flexibility. Not me, my team. I don't deal with it anymore. SLA gives me flexibility to do things that I need without involving development, not that I mind, but it's better to do it yourself. For example, adding descriptions that I need for for my Latin American business. It's a great thing. It's like a couple of clicks you have it without any development involvement. I love that. So SLA is good, AME (Approval Management Engine) is also very good. It's excellent.

If you upgrade to 12.2.5 you won't have iProcurement problems. But if you upgrade to 12.2.4, you're going to get those in abundance. It's going to keep you employed till the rest of your life. So you upgrade to 12.2.5 to get rid of those. However, if you upgrade to 12.2.5 you will get localization support at zero level because it hasn't been added yet to the release.

So go figure, what I going to do when I have the whole world of Oracle in Latin America and I can't take 12.2.5? We opted for a broken iProcure that we're going to fix ourselves.

We've been using Oracle EBS since 1998.

Well, let's think about it. This product could be stable if it's a good support team supporting it. If there is a teams of experts supporting it, yeah, it is stable. But sometimes it becomes unstable and then a good support team jumps into it and makes it stable again.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Most companies use Oracle E-Business Suite for finance and supply chain management, but we mainly use it for payroll in the current scenario. We also use it for the core HRSCM compensation benefits as part of Oracle Fusion.

The company has been working with Oracle E-Business Suite for a while, but now they are gradually moving into Oracle Fusion SCM, so they have acquired some product offerings for Oracle Fusion SCM. They want to run it on Oracle SCM, but their core system is still Oracle E-Business Suite. They have adopted a different type of solution for core HR and recruitment. We use another organizational tool for the recruitment part, so we have to build code systems to integrate Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion.

That's another general use case for Oracle E-Business Suite, but it varies among organizations. If they want to run HR and finance separately, a lot of integration is necessary to get the employee details into Oracle Finance. We have to pass payroll information into the GL and finance side, so the company would prefer to keep everything in the ecosystem where payroll is happening. They generally use Oracle Finance Payroll. Core HR is part of the Oracle E-Business Suite model they have. Now, they're looking for that functionality on a different SaaS-based solution. It can be Oracle Fusion or SuccessFactors. 

It is a hybrid office approach because no single solution will work because of all the regulations. Some departments of a financial institution have specific policies for their data centers. They generally need to use an on-premise solution, but some want to move to the cloud environment, but there are content restrictions. 

They are already using the on-premise Oracle E-Business Suite solution, so we need to implement it and one other thing. That Oracle E-Business Suite has a lot of customization options that aren't possible in a SaaS-based solution. It varies from process to process and industry to industry.

Oracle E-Business Suite is flexible. Its rich functionality can work in any client environment or business. 

The UI isn't up to speed with most digital marketing-style interfaces. It's not an end-user-responsive UI.

I have 16 years of professional experience, and I have been working with Oracle E-Business Suite for 12 years. For the past three or four years, I have been working with Oracle Fusion System, which is a pure SaaS solution.

It's a stable solution if we move to OCI. From a perspective of infrastructure, disaster recovery, and scalability, I would suggest going to OCI rather than staying on-premise and managing the infrastructure within your organization.

Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle support is good. 

The installation is a little tricky If you are using the on-premise version. We need to set up the infrastructure and plan for company growth and scalability. If you're on-premises, you need to build a structure and then deploy the system, so that takes a little time.

We have to consider many parameters, including security. For example, we need to implement policies if we want to access the system outside the company network. We need to plan for the number of nodes, like the knowledge application and database nodes. 

The other aspect is the number of instances required and the production capacity of each instance. We need to set up the test, development, and regression environments, then configure the backup and disaster recovery policies. 

I'm not involved with licensing. I think it's annual, not monthly

I rate Oracle E-Business Suite eight out of 10. My advice for using the solution varies depending on the customer, business, and industry. If I'm talking about an STM solution and the policies allow it, I would recommend Oracle Cloud rather than Oracle E-Business Suite. If possible, we recommend using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, so everything is managed by Oracle.

I am a system analyst and database supervisor. I prepare the reports and take the reports from the system. 

We are mainly using this product for HR and finance. We also use it a little bit for supply chain. We are using a legacy version of this product.

It is scalable. 

We don't like Oracle EBS because it is very old. Nowadays, all the systems are on the cloud and web-based. With Oracle EBS, you need a huge setup before installing it. You need a lot of servers. There are a lot of problems and bugs in the system. We have to move from Oracle EBS to another system. In terms of improvements, it can have better training for end users and better support.

We have been using Oracle E-Business Suite in some divisions since 2014.

It is stable because we already know where are the problems and errors. So, we are able to handle it manually, but this is not healthy at all.

It is scalable. We have around 1,000 users. 

We didn't use their technical support because we didn't pay for the license for support.

I am not responsible for installation or setup. You need a huge setup and a lot of servers before installing it.

Its implementation was very difficult. We used an implementer, but he was bad.

I would recommend this solution but with good implementation from the beginning. After implementation, you can build whatever you want. You can create any flow.

We will continue to use this solution because we have the system license, but we will eventually move from Oracle EBS to another system. We are trying to go to HCM Fusion, but we have some problems with the management. That's why we haven't moved to Fusion.

I would rate Oracle E-Business Suite a seven out of ten.

The benefits of APEX and EBS is that APEX actually lives outside of EBS. When you develop customizations you don't have to embed them inside EBS. Now when you upgrade EBS or apply patches to it generally everything gets overwritten. If your customizations are inside EBS they get overwritten. In order to upgrade EBS you have to take those customizations out, park them on the side, do your upgrade and then take those customizations and reapply them to the product. Which is risky, time consuming, very expensive. If they're outside an EBS, in APEX that means if you upgrade everything the only thing you have to touch are the pieces of the API that may have changed in the upgrade. You don't have to do as much work to get that upgrade done.

Another aspect of it is that APEX is fundamentally PL/SQL solution with a lot of SQL. It lives inside the database. Therefore your existing EBS team who are already experts in SQL and PL/SQL can get up to speed very, very quickly with Apex. Apex is a declarative environment therefore it's a very rapid application development environment so you can do stuff really quickly.

There's a new version of APEX coming out to very, very soon, APEX 5.1 and that contains probably the last pieces of my wish list. Which would be very intuitive and easy to use, declarative set of tabular forms where's it's like a spreadsheet. You can see a lot of rows and update them simultaneously. That is a big step forward. Typically when we do conversions from Oracle forms applications, oracle forms is quite good with that multi row update and that in the past has been a weakness with APEX. This new version will completely wipe that problem out.

The scalability is really good because since APEX is inside the Oracle Database and it's just PL/SQL code with the SQL statements, it scales with the database. Which means it is completely scalable. For example shop.oracle.com which is the Oracle site for buying Oracle stuff is an APEX application. That's up 24/7, it's hit around the world, multi-lingual, you can buy the products in Farsi in German and all those languages.

Well APEX is a kind of a funny product in the Oracle space. Number one it's a no cost feature of the database. It doesn't get a lot of attention from the Oracle sales people. That's a fair comment, there's no commission for it. Therefore it's kind of like a hidden thing inside the database and a lot of people at organizations that have Oracle and very good Oracle people actually don't know it exists. That's part of what we do is we try to raise the awareness of APEX in the Oracle space. One of the big features of Oracle is if you want to do some customization and make a web application on top of an Oracle database it needs to be considered because it is a world class tool right now. Scales beautifully, it's got in their mid-tier the ORDS product, the Oracle Rest Data Services, mid-tier portion which is very light and small that has restful services which opens up the entire world to an APEX application. It can touch any database that has rest services exposed and it can go on to the cloud and if you want your list of Amazon books or go to Netflix, all of that stuff is easily available through that ORDS technology.

Training for APEX goes through several steps like anything else. You start as a beginner, go through intermediate and become senior. It's very easy to take that first step and become a very good confident beginner because it is a declarative environment all you need to do to get started with APEX is a little bit of SQL knowledge and not even PL/SQL when you start because it's all declarative. Oracle gives you some very good starting documentation. There are some good books now by the A press publisher, beginning Oracle Application Express. There's a couple of very good introduction books. If you work through those you'll be able to be very productive APEX developer.

APEX by itself is easy to learn and it's extremely powerful because it sits right sort of in the mid-tier between the Oracle backend and the JavaScript front end. The backend you since it's got a very easy interface into PL/SQL you've got all the rich environment like SQL analytics, very powerful Oracle engine underneath you and you can reach all of that stuff very, very easily from APEX. On the front end the tool gives you a lovely set of themes and templates for putting out your HTML and cascading style sheets and your JavaScript for the front end stuff. You can use APEX out of the box and get a very good user interface but if you want to customize it or brand it's nothing more than HTML, CSS and JavaScript which is all under your control.

If you're doing customization on top of an Oracle database you've got lots of competing technologies. For example ADF which is an Oracle product that Java based technology. You can use .NET. There is all sorts of other web technologies that can be used. You can even put things like Excel and Microsoft Access, those have jet engines in them that will talk to an Oracle database. All of these things can do what APEX does. A lot of that is driven by like, if you're an organization and say you've got a bunch of .NET programmers. Well if you've got .NET programmers use .NET.

Years ago I was in a small shop and we were using Visual Basic 6. Visual Basic 6 at the time was going to be deprecated by Microsoft. With this team I was looking down the road and I was looking at using Java and I was looking at using .Net going forward. Since those are heavy in the mid-tier, I was seeing maybe tiers at 2:00 in the morning for this team especially the team when they saw curly braces the Java they got with catatonic. I was really nervous because these folks were coming from like a Fox pro background and a VB park. They were just really uncomfortable with the Java stuff, .NET stuff. Then I found application express and I went back to my team, showed it to them, we got to the apex.oracle.com workspaces up which is a free cloud based solution that allows you to kick the tires. We kicked the tires and realized we were saved. We went down that road because it was very easy for my team to come up to speed very quickly with that product and we did that.

Rating: with the current version I would say eight because like any other tool it's got its strengths and there are a few weaknesses, but I consider it a very high quality product. I've been with APEX now for over ten years. I built the farm on APEX and I've been very successful with it and many of my clients have been very successful using the product.

Basically if somebody comes to me like a young millennial says, "Okay, should I learn APEX?" The short answer for me is, "Yes." The company I am with, Insum, we've been doubling over the last few years because there's a huge amount of uptake of APEX right now. We have some very large clients here in the States some of the major banks use APEX for their production systems. We're into other large industries that have really found it very very useful and we jumped into it with both feet. We have no direct competitors because the people that theoretically are our direct competitors are basically our joint venture partners. There's so much work out there that we don't step on each other and it's growing every day.