Oracle Hyperion Reviews

We use HFM as a consolidation tool because we own several different companies, and we consolidate up to the eliminations and allocations through Oracle Hyperion. Additionally, we use it to help us with foreign currency, and then we use planning for forecasting and capital five-year plan projections.

We are upgrading Oracle Hyperion to 11.2.5.

Oracle Hyperion is fairly user-friendly and not too complicated. The forecasting, it's really good. It's sometimes slow when there are a lot of users using it and we can have up to approximately 300 users using it. However, you can do it in Excel because there's an Excel add-in. This is a benefit because a lot of people do this way instead of having to go into the planning application itself.

Sometimes Oracle Hyperion is slow when there are a lot of users using it. However, we can have up to approximately 300 users using it.

There's a part of Hyperion that's called FDMEE and it can be quirky to use. Sometimes how people load data into the different applications when the data loads cause a problem for security. For example, if we have a new acquisition and we go in and we put security on it, it can mess up everybody's security. We then have to go back and uncheck some configurations. Hyperion is aware of the problem, they know it's a bug but they have not fixed it at this time.

The integration between the applications could be better. We use Extended Analytics Link(EAL), when we move data between the actuals and forecasts the reporting features could be enhanced.

I have been using Oracle Hyperion for approximately 20 years.

The solution is stable.

Oracle Hyperion is scalable. I have worked in many companies that use the solution in different ways and it has done very well.

I don't have to deal with technical support on a regular basis. The administrators of the applications use the support. I would sometimes listen in on the calls, but the administrators are the ones that use the support, and the support it's good, they're responsive. However, sometimes it feels as if they're reading a script.

If we have not received the support we want we escalate the call to a more experienced support agent.

The licenses cost approximately $1,000.

I would recommend this solution to others.

There are some enhancements that can be done, but it's fairly stable and it's easy to use.

I rate Oracle Hyperion an eight out of ten.

Hyperion has made our budgeting process and forecast analysis easy and robust, and it is a reliable tool. Primarily, we are using Hyperion for our budgeting analysis and to complete our whole budget cycle within the EPM application. We take the HR data from our legacy system, which is Cyborg, and then load it into Hyperion. We have a very specific type of planning application (PSPB) which is meant for public-sector planning and budgeting for governments, and it has most of the built-in, out-of-the-box calculations for us that we used to do in traditional Excel before and there was always a chance of human error. Security was an issue because we did a lot of emailing back and forth with the sensitive HR data.

It secures our sensitive data because it's security-enabled and is reliable with it's back-ups, migrations and restoration methodology. We can do LCM exports and import into target servers and applications. You can back up everything. Security tool is also integrated into the application. I'm happy with the security, how it is handled, and how users can integrate with their Active Directory. You don't have to go out of directory to get user names and passwords.

We're evolving with Hyperion as we move along in our yearly cycles. We have come to the point where the end-users are trained well on it. We don't have to go back and forth with emails, sending Excel files, anymore. We used to have big Excel files that you might not even be able to send through emails. Sometimes you have to put them in some common shared drive and then other users have to get it and then approve it and then send it back. That was not only insecure but it was also a hassle.

With Hyperion, all the design is done in one database, which is the central repository for all users. We have around 30 departments and they have different cost centers, and 150+ users are using the application. They're all managed by a team of around 10 budget analysts in our budget department, so the big advantage is it's all in one central repository for them. We have security-enabled for all the cost centers, and departments can log into it and they only see what they're supposed to see based on their access and based on what department they belong to.

With a big entity like government sectors, we have around 3700 employees. Like I said, we have a lot of users for this application and Hyperion has made it easier to access the data, process it, and perform data integration. Data consolidation is easier and running the reports is very easy. Hyperion has some good built-in reports and we are building our budget book from it, which is a big achievement for us.

We used to build a budget book, which is this thick book you have to print, and so putting it together was a huge challenge because you have to combine all the Excel reports with all the word narratives, format it, and then publish it for the public. Now, it's all being done using Hyperion. We're entering data into Hyperion and then pulling the reports out of there and combining the smart view add-on in Excel. Users can connect to the databases in Hyperion and then using Excel, they can pull the grids/reports, build the budget book, and then publish it.

It's easy, robust, reliable, more secure, and has built-in calculations which avoids human errors.

Not many people are aware of the new feature called Decision Package. We have a very specific tool in Hyperion called Public Sector Planning and Budgeting. It's for government entities, and it's a part of Decision Package. It's used for government entities to budget their positions, their allocations to different departments, their expenses and to create new budget requests, and to create new positions and do their analysis on it. 

The Decision Package is a new feature within this application, and they released it around 2 or 3 years ago. It's working well, but it has a lot of complaints from business users. It is meant for business users, not a technical person, but they always get back to me and ask me a lot of questions and I have to troubleshoot a lot.

Oracle development is still working hard on it, I know, but it's been 3 years and it's still not 100% mature. I have a lot of issues with it. That's one of the areas that I would like to see improvement because we are one of the pioneers in the United States to implement that module in the government sector, so not a lot of users and clients are using it and we don't have a lot of help from our peers. When we talk to different peers, if they don't have it, we don't have something in common to talk about. That's our pain point, and users are having a lot of trouble and we have a lot of complaints about it.

Other than that, Hyperion is a fantastic planning tool. It works great. I always encourage users to use it instead of their accreditation auxiliary reporting, but this tool it puts me down sometimes in front of the business users. If I can't troubleshoot it and I can't give them the answer, I have to create an Oracle SR that can't be resolved in time. We have missed deadlines because of that and I had to create some workarounds from my side. That's how we got it resolved, but it's a huge pain.

It has a lot of limitations, too, on reporting of the text and formatting. For example, with the Budget Book, that's for the whole county and we publish it and we build it out of Hyperion, and if we use the reports from Financial Reporting Studio, we cannot format the way we would like to. It has a lot of limitations on text and formatting. I have tried a lot of formulas to get the format that I want, but it's not fully capable of handling a lot of text data and formatting that I need. That's another area in reporting that needs a lot of improvement.

Some stability issues are there with the Decision Package and the kind of application we have built. It has all the out-of-the-box functionality from Oracle, but it's really complicated. It's not just any hyperlink application, which all or most of the clients are using. It's very particular to government entities and how they budget their chart data and their expenses for the whole county. It's a lot of data. We have a data budget worth almost $2.5 billion, which is a lot to handle with all the different accounts and awards, projects, programs that are within our hierarchy. 

It has some stability issues. Some bugs are still there, but we have workarounds which are working fine. I would like to see improvements in the specific area that I was talking about.

We are using two tools for reporting. One is the SmartView app that's used with Excel. I like it a lot. I told all of my users to use it because it has all the drilling and rolling and all the capabilities for analysis of online database applications. The other tool, which is called Financial Reporting Studio, is not user-friendly at all and it can improve a lot. It has potential to have some improvement from Oracle from a development point of view. It needs a technical developer to build the reports out of that tool, which is not good for the business users. They try to learn it but it's too complicated for them and it's clumsy and it's not as simple as using, of course, the Excel reporting that they are used to. There are not a lot of options that are available for reporting in Hyperion other than these couple of tools.

A lot of functional users or managers involved in buying Hyperion don't realize what they're buying and what it's capable of. So, requirement analysis is the key thing. Before you talk to an implementer, determine what it is that you need and what tools Hyperion has available.

There are different tools for different purposes -- planning, forecasting, financial analysis, etc. The tools in Essbase is a little different from the tools in Hyperion. Before Oracle acquired Hyperion in 2006, it wasn't so mature, but not with the acquisition, it's expanded a lot and it much bigger than it was 10 years ago. You now have different out-of-the-box functionalities for each tool that serves the purposes of your requirements.

The key thing is to analyze and see, do you need Essbase or do you need Planning? Within Planning, what is the specific tool? We are using Public Sector Planning and Budgeting, and within that tool we are using the Position Only Model, and in that tool we are using the Decision Package Enable Application, so that's a key thing.

You need to see what you need and go for the implementation. That's why the implementer partners are there.

I work for an investment banking client. They use the solution to compute wealth-added numbers in Essbase. I get the data from different sources like Informatica, Upstream, and EDM. EDM is a kind of metadata management, and I get static data from EDM. In terms of data, I get the market values and transactions. I get the market data from EDM regarding tax information, unlevered beta, and all such parameter information.

From there, Oracle Hyperion will consume this data, run some calculations, and compute the wealth-added number, which has a certain formula. It all happens under lower granularity. Once the data has been loaded and calculated, it will be aggregated to the top level. Once the aggregation happens, users access the data using the Smart View Excel add-in.

They connect to the Essbase application using the Smart View Excel add-in and retrieve the data. Oracle Hyperion has the capability to hold data from the last ten years for historical analysis and retrieval purposes. The solution has a simple use case which is not very complex.

Oracle Hyperion is an advanced analytical calculation engine that can handle aggregation. From a user perspective, the solution can perform slice-and-dice operations and retrieve data. It is a traditional legacy application.

I mostly used Smart View, which does not have many great features compared to Qlik Sense. The solution's reporting and dashboards need improvement. Nowadays, all cloud technologies like Power BI and Qlik Sense can easily add new dimensions. However, doing the same in Oracle Hyperion is not simple and needs a lot of enhancements.

The licensing cost for the on-premises version of the solution is too high. Customers are nowadays moving to good solutions in the open system that offer less cost.

I have been using Oracle Hyperion for 14 years.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven to eight out of ten.

The solution's scalability is fine. One client from the investment banking industry was using the solution. In terms of increasing the number of applications, I rate the solution's scalability a six to seven out of ten. Regarding business requirements, complexity, and adding some new features, I would not recommend Oracle Hyperion to others. I rate Oracle Hyperion a four to five out of ten from this perspective.

Sometimes, the technical support is bad and takes a long time, but sometimes it is okay. If you want a patch from Oracle, they make you do different things, and sometimes you may not get concrete updates. I recently faced an issue where I was not able to download the patch from Oracle, and it was an issue with the portal.

I asked the technical support person to give me an alternative way to provide the patch manually, which he couldn't do because of their policy. I faced certain challenges. Other than that, I used to fix data issues, data failures, and environment issues without interacting with the technical support team.

I rate the solution's technical support a six to seven out of ten.

Neutral

The solution's deployment time depends on the complexity of the project. We need to develop an application based on the client's requirements. For on-premises, we already have an existing setup for Essbase. If we are looking for any version upgrade, we need to take the new VMs, install them, and configure them to the latest version of Oracle Hyperion Essbase.

Then, we need to migrate our applications. That's an upgrade project that will take around six months. This time may vary in the cloud environment. I am talking about the on-premises upgrade process, which involves moving an existing application to a different version. New development projects or small projects will take around six months, whereas bigger projects may take one year. It all depends on the kind of business requirements.

The licensing cost for the on-premises version of the solution is too high. Oracle Hyperion should upgrade itself by seeing how other products offer lower prices. Cost matters for an organization when setting up the complete environment. Whether companies want to use the product for bigger or smaller requirements, they have to pay the licensing costs based on the number of users.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a nine to ten out of ten.

I mostly use an Oracle Hyperion Essbase product, and the latest version I worked on is 11.2.11. Oracle Hyperion has operating and capital expense module features that will be helpful in budgeting. Any organization can use the solution's planning module to plan its budget for the next six months or one year based on current data and upcoming trends.

Overall, I rate the solution a five out of ten.

We use this solution primarily for financial planning and forecasting, to determine how much cash flow is required on a monthly basis.

The roll-up potential of the product is very good, meaning we have detailed information and we want it to be summarized, based on geography, different product lines, or different charts of accounts in the general ledger. It rolls up the information in a very concise way. This makes it easy to understand the overall performance for its forecasting aspects, either quarterly reporting, year-to-year, or month-to-month reporting.

Configuration is a little complex, it's not very easy. The solution is integrated with Essbase and there are not many users of the Essbase database.

If they can provide different modules for each subject area, like supply chain, for inventory forecasting or for order management forecasting, it would make each subject area easier to manage.

I have been using this solution for over 10 years. 

After setup, the solution was stable, it performs well and delivers what we expect from it. 

It's not scalable. It's not scalable. We are moving away from it, with the ERP cloud migration, we will retire this product.

There are over 50 Oracle Hyperion users in our company.

Before using Oracle Hyperion I used Aprimo, a Teradata product. 

Aprimo is very fast, so if we are using a structured dataset it is unbeatable. It's very fast and very easy to set up. It has different modules depending on what kind of forecasting you want to do, whether that's related to planning, to the supply chain, to order management, or to inventory management.

In Hyperion, we don't have those modules, it's complete customization, and it's basically for finance only. These are the basic differences.

Aprimo is expensive, Oracle Hyperion is cheap.

The initial setup was 10 years ago and I wasn't with the company then so it would be difficult to say how much time it took, but we talk about monthly or yearly deployment.

I distinctly remember teams talking about it, it was not easy, and the team used to call it a black box. They called it that due to the number of abstraction layers between data, so nobody knew how it handled the data sets.

The solution was implemented via an in-house team.

The solution is affordable.

We will continue using the solution for now but we will definitely implement a different solution in the future. 

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

I'm the subject matter expert of the finance team, so in finance, we have a vice president who is actually head of the finance dataset. He reports directly to the CEO and is a big fan of Hyperion. He uses it for planning and forecasting each month, with a team of 14 or 15 core members, all of whom use Hyperion.

We also have a sales team and they use the Hyperion datasets for product discounting, based on the previous months track record of customers, they give discounts to the customers.

Functionality-wise, it is what they say it is. It is the best in class, but it all ties back to your users. If your users are completely enamored with Excel spreadsheets, then breaking those habits is hard. What you really get is data governance and control. We haven't gone to the cloud service yet, so I really can't comment on that, but at the end of the day, depending on your users, the ability to forecast long-term is a great feature. We're in the process of putting that in, and some of the stakeholders are really excited about that functionality, but it's all about data governance. A company that was trying to do this on the cheap using an Oracle Essbase cloud service got data corruption in one month because they didn't have the necessary security, and people were overriding other people's plans.

From going from level one to four, they've done a lot with driving the user to control what they're doing versus having a dependency on an administrator to drive data movement. Again, it's all predicated on how your planners want to use the application. You can give them all the tools, but if they don't engage in that type of planning, then you can have a Cadillac system. If they're only going to use 10% of it, you're not going to drive that value.

All the planning systems out there are great. It doesn't matter which company you use. They're all great. I've seen demonstrations on a number of them, but it all boils down to the culture within the organization itself to use that functionality, understand it, and help drive it. I've had Oracle salespeople do demonstrations, and it looked really good. We get it on board, and everybody still sticks to their Excel spreadsheets because companies are a lot more complex than what you could deliver on the planning system. So, there should be more education on the capabilities, and there should be more understanding of organizations in terms of the way they access the data in order to plan. Because my organization is complex and there are different data streams, they don't bolt into Hyperion very well. You still have to extract the information and load it in, which is really difficult, especially if you have older systems or if you're going from a mainframe system for some of that information because there is no application out there now that's bolting on the mainframe systems.

We have the full suite with consolidation. We have Hyperion Financial Management. Our challenges, if we ever have one, are really on the server-side, because you're dealing with SQL Server, as well as your Essbase Server, especially for planning. If those servers go down within the organization, it's not Hyperion's fault. It's your own organization's fault. So, from a stability perspective, it's extremely stable. If you're going to go to the cloud, the internal factors that could trip you would go away. You would be within Oracle's ecosystem, and you don't have to spend the money to have a DBA managing your application on the backend. My team is a bit of a hybrid. We report to the business, but we do all the setups within the application itself.

I have rarely interacted with them. At least with Hyperion planning, we've been pretty self-sufficient, and we haven't hit a bug. 

If you read their game plan, they're pushing everybody to the cloud. We're not on the cloud application yet. We're on an older version that's being retired.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Oracle Hyperion is useful for financial reporting and budgeting. 

This solution is deployed on-prem. 

Oracle Hyperion's scalability could be improved. 

This solution is stable. 

This solution is scalable, but we are thinking of the cloud to improve scalability. 

There are about 700 users of Oracle Hyperion in my organization. We have plans to increase our usage: when the company grows, the system will grow also. 

The technical support is fine. Previously, the support exchanges with Oracle were difficult, but now it's much better. We manage most things without contacting Oracle. 

The installation is easy, but I'm the admin—we have a partner who manages the installation. I think it took about two to three days. 

For a technical team, we have two people who manage the worldwide financial information. 

We implemented this solution through a partner. 

We pay for licensing yearly. 

I rate Oracle Hyperion an eight out of ten. We are satisfied with this solution and I would recommend Oracle to others. 

Our primary use case for the product involves supporting customers in constructing forecasting models within the Oracle Hyperion platform.

With this solution, logic, calculations, and other functionalities are centralized, eliminating reliance on specific personnel. Additionally, employees gain value from working with advanced products like Hyperion, enhancing their skill sets.

The cloud storage engine is the most valuable financial analysis feature, and it is highly powerful and has useful workflows.

They could support machine learning algorithms for the product. Such functionality would make operations easier for finance executives in the next five years. They are trying to edit the functions, but automation learning is moving at a fast pace. Oracle must quickly implement or provide these features as customers increasingly demand them. This is the biggest trend emerging from the customer side.

We have been using Oracle Hyperion for 15 years.

The stability of the on-premise versions is quite impressive.

We have more than 20 Oracle Hyperion users in our organization. It is a scalable product.

The initial setup is straightforward, particularly when working with a consultant company that has already explained its use case.

The deployment process typically starts with understanding customer requirements through a discovery phase. Once the scope and requirements are agreed upon, the solution is implemented. Data validation, especially for financial closure, is conducted to ensure accuracy. Finally, the solution is deployed to production.

The pricing model for the cloud setup is subscription-based, typically monthly. On the other hand, Oracle on-premise is user-based, meaning organizations pay upfront for an annual subscription, depending on the number of users they require. It might be considered relatively costly compared to some alternatives.

The platform's data integration is indeed powerful. We can collect data from various sources, which is very useful for budgeting and planning.

The impact on financial processes is significant. It dramatically reduces the time required. Without such solutions, financial consolidation or closure may take around ten days. However, with Oracle Hyperion, for instance, there are real use cases where customers can close their month or quarter within a maximum of five days.

One of the main challenges has been related to the requirements we receive from customers. Some of the features and functionalities they require are not available in the cloud version of Oracle Hyperion.

Besides recommending the product itself, it's crucial to emphasize the importance of aligning with a reputable consulting company with experience in multiple projects.

I rate the product an eight out of ten.

Hyperion is a planning and budgeting solution for large enterprises.

On-premise, we have anywhere from 10 to 50 users. Clients are moving to the cloud versions of the software. Although we do on-premise, we also do the new cloud versions, which is called EPBCS, or Enterprise Planning and Budget Cloud Service. The market is moving away from the on-premise version.

The solution has good integrations, but they could still be improved.

The level of complexity of the implementation is always a challenge. They're for larger enterprises. They're just complex implementations and obviously we implement them, so we know the steps that have to be done. There could be better integration tools.

It's pretty stable. These Hyperion planning solutions do require maintenance, so that's always an issue.

This product is very scalable. 

Technical support is mixed. When you get to the right people, it can be very good, but if you don't get to the right people, it's not so great. It really depends.

We specialize in EPM solutions, originally from Hyperion Essbase and then onto Hyperion planning, and now we're mostly in the cloud. It's just a natural product migration, so that's the main reason why we chose it. Hyperion is the market leader in this space.

The initial setup was complex. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the complexity a four.

The ROI is high. I think they provide a lot of value. On a scale of one to five, I would rate the ROI a four.

I would rate Oracle Hyperion a 9 out of 10. It's not perfect, but it's good. It's probably the best on the market.

My number-one advice is that you probably shouldn't do the on-premise. Go to where the future is—which is the cloud—unless there are very specific reasons because all the development and all the new features are coming out on the cloud first.