Oracle Hyperion Reviews

Hyperion tools are very useful in finance. For example, the data relationship management is good for anything that you need to store hierarchical information about, and can be used for data enhancement and modeling. It has a lot of features that assist other parts of the organization as well, but the tools evolved around financial organizations.

In finance, if you have a central repository feeding all of your downstream systems of the metadata that you use, you reduce the number of account reconciliations and report reconciliations that you have to do. It also gives you data quality.

I think that Oracle in general is moving towards cloud technology to remove some of the costs associated with, for example, the EPM suite. The EPM suite, as its capabilities increase, requires upgrading your servers and keeping up with the technology. By going to the cloud, customers are able to avoid those costs.

Once the Oracle products are installed, they're pretty stable. A lot depends on how they're set up, and a lot depends on making sure that you adhere to best practices.

All the Hyperion products that I'm involved with scale very well. They're designed to handle large businesses. People sometimes want to do strange things. They push the tools to the limit, for example. They want to do consolidation of the product level or a customer level, and then it gets a little more complicated.

Most of the problems that we find with the products that we deal with go to Oracle for service. They have a good service organization 24/7.

Our organization has staff dedicated to the infrastructure. There are a lot of intricacies to setting up the products. It's useful to get professional people involved, especially with some of the more complex stacks features that you need to make the whole suite operate. As the products have evolved, they've merged more of the technologies together, so they're more dependent on making sure that you set the right parameters.

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. For what they're designed for, the tools are very useful.

For me, Smart View has been the most valuable feature, because you can use most of the Excel points.

We can do budgeting on time and provide an accurate forecast. You can also have budget, actual, and plan within the same report.

We usually do granular level of forecast or budget, and Oracle needs to start supporting that.

It is stable.

We have had more data to manipulate every time on promises. We have to scale a lot. It would be great if they could bring out all the cloud functionality on promises.

Most of the time it takes three months and you don’t get results. I think the Oracle support is concerned about the cloud.

If you get the product, attend boot camp training and then start getting hands on. I would rate it a 7 out of 10.

The ease of use and the integration with our business are the most valuable features. We require less IT support, so the business and functional people can do more and more of the work they want to do.

I think they are going to have a better, faster, cheaper close process and BI. From a reporting standpoint, it won’t be pure BI.

There should be more effort put into integration processes. There area lot of products that work best together, but figuring out how to get them all to work together is still a challenge. Since there is a lot of overlap between the products, knowing exactly which parts of which products to use at what time is a challenge, and is where technical requirements still exist for us.

Stability is actually really good. About fifteen years ago, Hyperion implementations were sketchy. There were a lot of failed applications that never got off the ground. There are much less today. Most implementations are successful now, and Oracle has become significantly more efficient in standing them up. There are not many issues.

Scalability is great. I think that it’s one of the strongest points. I've worked as an independent for a lot of different types of companies, and I've seen Hyperion work well at large international banks and mid-size manufacturing companies.

Tech support is pretty good. There are certain issues that pop up that are critical or require patching of the application, and that can be a long, drawn-out process. If I could make any change, it would be providing a way to quickly realize where there is a true problem, so you don’t have to work through level three, then two, then one, which takes weeks of time to finally get to resolution.

Since every company does it a little bit differently, there aren’t any best practices. Larger companies have tickets and dedicated IT and technical administrators. Smaller companies have advanced super users who pretty much do everything. Some companies follow very strict processes of taking new implementations and running them through dev tests, then into prod. Other companies make changes right in production. It’s really across the board.

It's complex. Oracle is addressing that issue with the cloud services. It's surprisingly popular as well. I was surprised at how quickly companies were putting their financial data up on the cloud. A lot of that is because the implementation process is a pain point, because there are so many ways to do it. Between Windows, Linux, all the different external applications, hardware and software configurations, it's tough. If you can relieve that, then you pull the hardest and most expensive part out of the equation, from an IT perspective. A tool for that would really service the business, since all of your investment dollars are really going towards the functional implementation.

Focus on functionality and on your business. Make sure you understand what the business wants to do. No company uses more than fifty or sixty percent of the functionality of an application, so don’t get caught up on every single bell and whistle and try to implement all the features. Just implement the parts of the product that are specific to your needs. I would rate the product a solid eight out of ten.

• Formula and form creation
• Data migration from the source system
• Approval stages

It has reduced the amount of paperwork as multiple people can work on a single form, centralize formula creation window (only one person/team is responsible for creating it), It is also possible to maintain history for X number of years, and compare budgets from previous years through just one form and the process of workflow management.

• The database crashes without any warnings/reasons
• It's a technical resource hungry piece of software

• They need to make this software easy to implement and use

I've used it for one and a half years.

Yes we had major issues because of the database.

Yes we had major issues because of the database.

Yes we had major issues because of the database.

6/10.

7/10

Only Excel.

It was complex because it was a new environment.

I was the lead in implementing it.

Not very high at least for a year or two.

No other options evaluated.

Take a good look before stepping into it.

The Essbase cube size scalability and also the calculation scrip functions.

This product has been helping the organization to implement complex budgeting models.

In my opinion, the reporting features could be visually better, and prettier, than it is so far.

I've used Hyperion Planning for over eight years as well as Account Manager Oracle.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No, far from it.

9/10.

7/10 - The Oracle support has loads to improve on in my opinion.

Yes. I have used SAP BPC and IBM Cognos. Both of them have no scalability unlike Hyperion Planning.

Straightforward.

I always implement solutions through a management consultancy team, because of their high level of expertise.

The initial cost was around US$300K and the actual cost is just the annual support fee.

Yes, we also looked at IBM Cognos and SAP BPC.

Architect design considering solution scalability is essential for a successful implementation.

We use mostly S-space planning, and have HFM and FDM as well. We're able to support fifteen to twenty countries globally from Cincinnati, and they can do all their consolidation on our one HFM application.

We have had a little difficulty with financial reports being buggy in the client.

We have been using it for about six months.

It has been pretty stable. We're on premise. Every once in a while we will have crash, but it’s usually nothing a reboot can’t handle.

It seems to scale pretty well. We just recently brought on another country and are in the process of building the application for them.

A big benefit for most of our users is that you can use it in Excel with a Smart View API. It does require a little bit of training when you first start using it though. I would rate it an eight out of ten.