Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

For us, the most valuable feature is that we have one database, one instance; yet we operate in more than six countries across the world, so it makes it easy for us to run with a very small IT staff.

Its features are good, but I think they need to look around at the other products in the market. There are a few industry standard features which are missing from this product. We are discussing one of these with them where synchronizing calendars across different countries is a big thing.

On the reporting side, they should give financial reports more in AxelBase to filter and sort data to make it faster and easier to close the books.

The other area is definitely the support side. Turnaround time needs to be faster. They need to improve working with the end user, and asking very specific questions to help resolve an issue. People should collect different types of information before sending the problem back and forth.

As a company, we've been using it for five years.

It didn't start that way; but at this point, it's pretty stable. Don’t forget there were improvements in the reporting side, the performance side, and in the UI experience.

I would say that it is scalable.

I have good and bad experiences with Oracle support. Sometimes it's very difficult to open up an SR, to keep it open, and to get a timely answer when you need it. It feels like everything has to be marked severity 1, critical, 24/7: sometimes in order for it to get something done. They might have heard that a lot, obviously.

We often have problems if we have to cross teams. If I have a problem, and then all of a sudden they decide, "That's receivables," so now you have to open a separate ticket with receivables. Receivables work differently than everyone else, so you're going to have to prioritize it higher and make it 24/7. It can be frustrating sometimes that all the support teams don't work similarly.

It's okay, but the real pain comes when you're moving from one area to another. Configuring the APR system is not that easy and it is not easy to get something out of it that you configured. You need to keep on working on an environment’s configuration to bring it up to speed. Now, you're sure this environment is all up-to-date, and everything is working fine. Now, we need to move into the next environment where people are going to test the system.

Currently, there is no automation for migrating an entire configuration to a different instance. You need to manually resolve all the errors. It is very difficult to even identify where and what went wrong. If you are really senior, and you have a lot of experience working on it, then it might easy for you to go and see, "We are missing that."

It would also benefit from a full-fledged comparison when something went wrong. If we could run something that will identify, "Here is the configuration here.This is a mismatch." That would also work well.

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.

It handles business application standard functionalities very, very well. It allows for easy customization and enhancements.

Sometimes with Oracle support, depending on the analyst you get, you can hit walls in trying to find answers. But they’ve gotten a lot better, so I hesitate in bringing that up.

About 10-11 years by now.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

7.5/10.

Nordstrom, my current employer, didn’t previously use a different solution.

I think we implemented via both vendor and in-house teams, and it's worked fine.

You should research the new cloud capabilities. It’s pretty important and a cost-effective way for a company to install.

We do not use Oracle E-Business Suite. We provide support and customization for the platform. 

Our clients, on the other hand, use Oracle E-Business Suite for administration, finances, and inventory. 

In our clients, eBS has enhanced the capacity to attend large volumes of transactions, which allows them to quickly attend to requests from their own clients and a prompt response from their suppliers.

The financial aspect of Oracle E-Business Suite is the most valuable for our customers. The solution is perfect for big industry and high-scale e-business transactions. 

Oracle E-Business Suite is not great for small and medium-sized enterprises. Those clients are better suited for Oracle's NetSuite. 

It would be great to see Oracle E-Business Suite become less dependent on the SOA solution, which is an integration solution for Oracle platforms. 

I have been a partner for Oracle E-Business Suite for 28 years. We have been implementing and supporting e-businesses since the beginning. 

Oracle E-Business Suite is very stable. In fact, that is why most clients land on this solution.

Oracle is continuously patching, upgrading, and reporting any changes or security issues, which contributes greatly to the stability of the solution. 

The scalability is good. However, how well it scales will depend on who is implementing the scaling. It has to be carried out by a highly-skilled team. Technical support comes in handy here. 

Oracle provides good support for the E-Business Suite. 

Positive

Oracle E-Business Suite does have a complicated deployment model. It is a SaaS solution, so deployment entails multiple databases and server configuration. The connection between the database and the application has to be configured as well. 

You do have to have expertise to carry out the implementation, however, I would rate the overall difficulty of the employment at a medium. 

The average deployment would require five skilled consultants. Some very basic deployments could be done with one or two deployment developer consultants. 

We got a return on our investment in a year with Oracle E-Business Suite. 

Oracle E-Business Suite is expensive. I don't know how much a license costs exactly, but I would wager it's around $1 million. This is a big implementation. 

The biggest selling points for Oracle E-Business Suite are business continuity, financial support, and accounting support. 

On a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and 10 being the best, I would give Oracle E-Business Suite a nine. The only reason I would not give the solution a 10 is because you need a partner for everything you would like to do with the solution, things like implementation, maintenance, and upgrades. 

Based on my technical background on Oracle EBS, I can tell that the primary use case of this solution is having a sophisticated software, an ERP, in the environment. It is to have a software system that consists of global business applications with built-in integrity. Generally, my customers use it for their business applications: CRM, Financials, Human Capital Management, Procurement, Supply Chain and more. There are also some seperate applications outside these ERP systems, but mostly, they are also tightly integrated with EBS.

EBS is a software as a whole. It includes its own database (Oracle Database), an application server (Oracle Weblogic), and software. It has cross-industry capabilities and makes customers operate in cost-efficient way.  As an ERP system, EBS offers lots of applications built in. So it helps the customer to automate their back office processes and let them make correct, fast, and reliable decisions. In Human Capital Management implementations, customers benefit from having a complete HR system and do all the HR work using the EBS screens. By customizing the product, customers can make the application processes be compatible with their special needs. Localization and translation options are also available with the product. Although the software is built by an American company (Oracle), other languages can be enabled and localization can be deployed without touching any code. With these features that support having a global software environment, customers who are working worldwide also gain an advantage. 

Using EBS features like Oracle workflow, lots of the processes are automated and made easier. Mobile Web Applications can be used to make the relevant users be able to use the applications directly. Successful implementations, success stories, big install base, know-how and continuous support of the community (Oracle itself and EBS consultants), make the customers feel safe. With the integrated service oriented architecture gateway (SOA Gateway) of EBS, EBS APIs can be triggered outside (from Cloud or from other applications).. This feature lets customers be able to integrate their application with EBS easily. When core business needs something from the back office, it just uses SOA Gateway to retrieve the meaningful data from EBS. All the technology and software is from Oracle. This is also very important to be able to get single vendor support when required. The technology stack is built on Oracle Technologies. It is not hard to find an expert when needed both for development and administration.

When I put these aside, EBS saves time and increases the efficiency for the customers.  By using the tightly integrated application of EBS, customers, provide the solutions for their business from a single source. The ultimate application design, high-level software engineering and power of the Oracle technologies delivered with the product are felt at any moment.

EBS has lots of application families and lots of features. It is modular in deployment and flexible enough to let the customer increase the built-in capabilities and enable new applications when needed. These are very important things at hand in case there will be a need to expand the product capabilities and/or implement new projects.

EBS has a certain history. There is a certain know-how with documentation for almost all its use cases.

The product relies on Oracle technologies, the world's leading Oracle Database and Oracle application tier. This is valuable because, while it satisfies lots of customer requirements and standards, it also means that the technology layer gets continuous improvements and updates, as Oracle keeps the components on this layer always up-to-date.

EBS 12.2, the newest release also provides an Online Patching option for supplying near zero downtime both for applications (functional side) and the technology stack. This is valuable in mission-critical environments. Online patching removes the barriers for an upgrade because it is online. It gives the customers the ability to make downtime negotiations easier. Using online patching, they have planned downtime and it is measured in minutes.

For customers who are using a virutalized environment, Oracle delivers VM templates (for Oracle VM Server). This feature also provides easy enablement for applications.

High availability and disaster recovery architectures make the product continuously operate by any means. Continuity can be guaranteed with these architectures. 

Oracle gives high importance to this product and following a "Continuous Innovation" release model for Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2. EBS 12.2 will be supported at least until 2030.

Administration takes some effort. Administrating the technology stack is not so complex but application aware database administration and following the new methodologies like online patching can be a little complex and time consuming. Oracle should ease the administrators jobs and do some innovation on this administration area as well. Oracle Autonomous Database is Oracle's leading technology these days. Using a similar approach, application stack may become a little more self-managing.

EBS still leverages Oracle Forms technology. Oracle Forms might be considered as an old technology when it puts the client machine into the picture. Clients are using their web  browser to connect to the EBS and use several functionality and applications using the web browser only. However, some applications automatically runs Oracle Forms through a Java applet on the client. Of course, this creates a fast, easy-to-use client experience, but it has disadvantages as well, such as, the requirement to manage the client side java.

I have been using and administrating this ERP system (Oracle EBS 12.2) almost since it was released. I have used Oracle EBS for human resources and financials in one my ex-companies and I have worked in the implementation of several EBS 12.2 projects in different customer environments with different product families. It has been more than five years now. I have also used the earlier releases of this product, such as Oracle EBS 11i and R12).  Oracle continued to enhance the product over the years, so this is a review for the latest release, version 12.2.

It is quite stable. It has been in the market for a long time. It is a product of the Oracle Corporation and was created in late 1980s and Oracle continued to enhance the product over the years. The latest release (release 12.2) was created in 2013. Before that, we released R12 (12.1 and 12.). Even release 11i which is quite old, is still used by customers.

The architecture, code, and support are by Oracle. The product is stable and behaves as expected, according to the documentation. Customers can get the benefit from business continuity, recovery, load balancing, fault tolerance, consistency, and scale-out architecture when the implementation is done accordingly.  

It is highly scalable. It supports scale-out architecture with both load balancing and high availability. Applications can run on multiple nodes and database can run Active-Active on Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters). This increases the computational resources. Note that, this is not only for increasing the throughput, but the high availability as well.

As EBS can leverage Oracle Real Application clusters techonology in the database tier, EBS databases can scale-out by adding database nodes to the configuration.. Thus, EBS database workload can be distributed to multiple Oracle database instances and EBS database throughput can be increased almost linearly. 

Similarly, in the application tier, we can have multiple application nodes working together to increase the application tthrougput.. In this context, we can have multiple application nodes, each have their own application servers (Weblogic), their own runtime and batch proccesses. By having this ability, we can increase application performance and make Oracle EBS handle several concurrent user connections.  Batch processing (which is called Concurrent Processing) can also work in the parallel mode (parallel across multiple application nodes) and can also leverage multiple Oracle database instances to provide better and guaranteed throughput.

When needed, more application and database nodes can also be added to the configuratio. We can also declare the role of these nodes according to our needs.. For instance, we can have one application node for serving the requests of internal users and we can have another application node for serving the requests of external users.. Similary, we can have a application node for serving all the web requests, and we can have another application node only for batch processing.

Having a multi-node application tier also provides high availability. That is, if we use a load balancer and configure our EBS well, application contiunity is guaranteed in case of a application node failure.

Moreover, EBS application and database tiers can be replicated to the disaster recovery sites for disaster recovery.. Oracle Data Guard Technology is used for database replication. A replication tool (such as rsync), a filesystem replication feature or a storage replication feature can be used for replicating the application tier to the disaster recovery sites. 

This type of a configuration can provide application continuity in case of a site failure..  Morever, active dataguard can be used for offloading some production reporting to Oracle EBS disaster site database instances..

Customers get their support from the Oracle support portal (support.oracle.com). Customers can also get local support from the Oracle Partner companies, which are quite capable of both implementing and supporting the solution. Both functional and technical support is available. Additionally, there are lots of public documents available, such as, books and blogs about EBS. This is also advantageous for customers who want to learn the product on their own and keep their support and consultancy cost minimum.

My customers and my ex-companies have used several custom and packaged applications before switching to EBS. They were using different application for different purposes. The applications they were using weren't modular.. 

The decision for switching to EBS was to have a centralized software system for bringing all the required functionalities and applications together. For one of my customer, the decision was made by head quarters which was located in another country. It was a big, global holding company and the head quarters decided to use the same software for all the companies under its control. 

Technically, it is straightforward. However, there are challenges in the functional side. This is expected as implementing ERP is a complex subject. 

When managed with a proper project plan and right resources, projects are completed on time and with success.

In most cases, I was on the vendor team that implemented the projects. In my experience, Oracle partners who are specialized in this area can be classified as experts with knowledge and real life expertise.

By using EBS, and putting almost all the functionality and applications integrated together inside this ERP, maintenance and consultancy costs previously required for different applications and application vendors can be reduced.

The labor and time required for manual data entry is avoided.

A better integration across the divisions is provided with these ERP implementations. This also provides a better visibility and reporting. Also, lots of business processes can be automated.

Thanks to online patching, Customers gain an opportunity to decrease their downtime.

In order to minimize the implementation and consultancy costs, business lines should have proper definitions. They need to have a proper way of retrieving their data, which should be structured well.

Both the current projects and future projects should be defined well. Licensing should be done according to current and near future plans.

Customer should do their sizing and understand their computational resource needs. They need to start sales negotiations according to their actual needs.

Customers should evaluate the partner who is responsible for implementing the project. 
The better the partner, the higher the success rate of the project.

We did evaluate other options. Customers usually evaluate solutions from local software providers. However, most of the time, enterprise customers conclude that those solutions are less capable than EBS. Most of the vendors that supply those solutions are quite smaller when compared to Oracle.. 

According to my experience, enterprise customers also consider SAP. In these considerations, the conclusion usually depends on the costs and are indexed to the success in the sales and pre-sales activities.

Customers can run Oracle EBS on Oracle Cloud today.. If the client's needs and expectations are met and they are compatible with the regulations they are subject to, they can also think of running Oracle EBS on cloud.

We implement Oracle EBS R12.2.5 in various companies, including financial and manufacturing distribution companies. The Oracle solution covers finance, procure to pay, order to cash, and inventory with process manufacturing or discrete manufacturing.

With Oracle EBS, the customer gets a better cost calculation and an integrated system between departments. Oracle EBS also provides the customer with faster financial closing because of its accurate calculations. Customers have previously used local ERP, Acumatica, SAP, and old systems such as FoxPro.

• Ledger and Subsidiary
• Operating Unit
• Inventory Organization and Location
• Subinventory and Bin
  
• In our financial information, we can utilize trial balance on the operating unit level. This feature is very useful for our distribution company.
  

Currently, Oracle is focusing on their Cloud ERP. Since Cloud ERP is being rebuilt from scratch using a different technology, it seems that their on-premise support is slow and unresponsive. This differs with SAP Strategy, whose cloud solution is moving to their on-premise solution.

It essentially runs our business, from our financials to manufacturing to supply-chain to planning instances. They all tie together with E-Business Suite to keep our business on track and running.

After we migrated to Oracle EBS from PeopleSoft, we had a little bit of a learning curve adopting new technology with a new look and feel. But our users have really latched onto it and learned it, and it matches up pretty well with our business process and what our users expect to be able to do.

The biggest area for improvement would be in the area of user adoption. After we did our first upgrade and went through the whole process, our users hated Oracle. So my biggest complaint would be the lack of Oracle support for end-users to resolve their issues after that first upgrade. It just wasn't a good experience.

We implemented it back in 2012.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been pretty stable. Any issues that I've seen are just day-to-day, normal issues. Every now and then we might see performance issues which are easily solved with a good team of DBA who can usually diagnose the problem. From the software perspective, there are patches available when we run into bugs and other issues.

We've had not had to scale it up at all.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, and we didn't start out with any customizations or anything like that. I think it was pretty straightforward, getting that business process around it.

We had our hosted partners and DBA team install it. I think a lot of things we had to match back were business processes from our ERP. Whatever ERP you're going to pick, there's going to be little hits against it. There are going to be a lot of things it does well and a lot of things it doesn't do so well. We seem to match up pretty good for what we're wanting to accomplish with it.

Advice depends on what your business is. If you're a financial company, you might have different requirements. For a manufacturing company, like us, it seems to be the best fit for what we want to do. Again, it's your requirements and what you're trying to get done with it.

We had an issue in which access should be made by the tax team and not necessarily the team entering the transaction. Oracle, however, has now made taxes a separate module for E-Business Suite, and with it, the tax team knows exactly what they have access to and what issues they need to fix. The tax module allows us to set up rules for the tax team to better do their job.

We've proposed many changes to Oracle. For example, we'd like to be able to customize a single specific piece of E-Business Suite without having to customize the entire structure. I'd also like an auto-review function so that we're able to see certain information without accessing it only if the management team asks us to.

We've been using it since 2004.

We've had no issues with deployment.

The stability is really 50/50 right now. It could be issues with certain pages or data, or it could be a training issue on our end.

It's scaleable. Oracle provides pretty good data plans for E-Business Suite so that you can customize using Java if you want.

The level of technical support depend on which analyst I'm getting through to. Sometimes they're pretty good, and other times they just throw their hands in the air.

The initial setup is pretty good now. Every page has help associated with it.