Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Reviews

Planning and budgeting is the core part of the tool. It's the body of the tool where information fits into this planning application and filters out to the other pieces, like reporting, consolidation, and other cubes. Planning is the most stable and solid tool available in the market.

We have recently moved this solution to the cloud.

The workforce, the cube database, is the most valuable feature where you do planning for your headcounts. There is a direct connection now with the cloud that you can connect to the Workday system, which is HR. Most of the planning and budgeting is done around headcount. That is now available to you with the live data from HR.

For HR, the workforce planning out of the box is complicated. For most users, it's not easy, and it requires a learning curve. It's not very user-friendly. It can be improved.

I have heard that it's being worked on constantly. There are changes going on with benefits, taxes, additional earnings, and all those. One piece that is missing is the  international taxation piece, which is not available in the tool. Companies like ours use this Bloomberg software. Most companies are international, so you need to have a tax structure, or benefits from the UK, Europe, and Asia built into the system or already available. It's not there yet.

I have been using this solution for 10 years.

This is one of the most stable solutions out there. I also hear this from colleagues and friends.

Tech support has gone down. Initially when it was on-prem, tech support was very sophisticated and knowledgeable. In my IT area, it's a common complaint that with some of the resources that Hyperion and Oracle have, these folks have no knowledge about how the tool works. When there is an issue, complaint, or inquiry, they're not able to help properly, like before.

I used Cognos for a couple years, which was bought by IBM. Cognos didn't gain the recognition that Hyperion has.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

Very large and complexes environments implementation, 10000+ users with 24x7 global operation and multiple EPM tools working in sync.

The improvement for the organization is the same as it is with Hyperion Planning plus the license is a lot more affordable and it has no need for in-house equipment. The only thing to remember is that with one license, you get just one application (with five cubes).

Well, the PBCS is almost the same as Hyperion Planning, with the exception that you don't have access to Essbase and to the relational repository. What you got is access to a web page where you can do your development. For me, as a developer, the most valuable feature is the Smart View Administrator add-in that allows me to load metadata very easy and very fast.

I think the biggest improvement would be to have direct access to other CS products you have; for example, that BICS could access directly the PBCS machine to produce dashboards or, better, ODI loading and extract data/metadata using a KM. This is in the Oracle road map.

More than 12 years.

We have not encountered any stability issues. This is better than on-premises solutions are for this topic.

Until now, I haven't had to increase my initial setup.

Customer Service:

I didn't have to access customer service.

Technical Support:

I didn't have to access technical support.

Neutral

I still use Planning on-premises and this wasn't the case of a switch. It was just a solution from a client that didn't want to have any kind of IT infrastructure in-house.

That is one big advantage of cloud solutions: no initial setup, just start to develop. And the development is almost the same as on-premises. The only difference is the way you load data and metadata.

I was the vendor team that implemented it.

Always talk with an Oracle representative and negotiate a discount. I have already seen 99% discounts and a free licence once.

Sometimes it is cheaper if you get hardware together (helps to negotiate a discount).

Because Oracle products are development frameworks, your final results are as good as the people who implemented them. Make sure that your implementation team is the best it could be, at least for the first implementation. If something is implemented incorrectly at the start, it'll cost you a lot more to fix than to build a new system from scratch. Sometimes it can be so badly designed that it is impossible to fix.

I've been working on implementation for 20 years and I have seen bad implementations everywhere. In fact, I have seen the same tools implemented in the same team by two different people, with one being a success and the other a failure. In the same company, one department says that the tool does not work for them and another says that the tool is the best. The only difference was the implementer. Make sure you get a good team to implement it. The tool has its flaws but most of time (99%), it is the implementer's fault that you have a bad or slow model.

Our planning is on-premise but we are moving towards the cloud.

Beneficial analysis and easy to do management adjustments.

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud could improve. There are times when the forms are slow in saving and calculating.

I have used Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud within the past 12 months.

I rate Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud an eight out of ten.

We use Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud everything. We have passed from using an entirely Excel spreadsheet system to one that incorporates not only the making of the planning but also the execution of the expenses. We can see every area of the budget.

From using Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud we do not have to deal with any infrastructure or maintenance as we did before.

We previously used Oracle EDS, and when comparing it to this solution, this solution has a much better interface. There are lots of advantages of the new solutions. Having it on the cloud, we are able to forget about keeping them updated or taking care of the database. We have minimal maintenance.

We have a lot of Oracle systems that we are planning on bringing to the Oracle cloud. It is going to be easier for us to keep them updated and use the latest functionality.

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud could improve by having better integration with some other modules that we would add to this solution.

I have been using Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud for approximately one year.

I have found Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud to be stable.

The Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud solution is scalable in the sense that you can add some more modules to allow the whole organization to use the services.

We do not have many people using this solution. The area that uses the budget and planning is small, there are approximately four people. However, the benefits of the modules are used by the whole organization. We all make our budget and planning in a way that ends at the budgeting module.

We are thinking of moving many of our processes to Oracle modules in the cloud.

The technical support is good. Whatever we need, the regional office of Oracle manages to give us support by connecting us with the experts of the system.

Previously to using Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud we were using a set of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets designed for us to handle all of the processes.

The initial setup is straightforward. We did not receive any formal training on how to use the system, it's very intuitive to use.

The whole implementation did not take long. It took a couple of weeks for them to do the provisioning for the environment and make the software available for us and other aspects, such as assigning the users. It has been easy. The IT department has done almost nothing to help the users.

We did the implementation directly with the regional office of Oracle that is located in Costa Rica.

We have units that take care of our Oracle products. We have two units dedicated to every Oracle product. One unit is dedicated to the e-business suite of products that are extensively used in our organization. In the other unit, takes care of the maintenance of Oracle Retail. However, no one is taking care of the cloud products because there is no need for us to take care of them. They require no maintenance needed for Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud.

By maintaining the use of our on-premises solutions is very costly for us. Since we moved to Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud for some of our processes it has saved us money.

The cost of the solution is approximately $40,000 annually and the price is based on the company size and the number of users that have access to it. We are paying for the license and we do not pay any additional fees.

The price of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud is expensive. However, it solves a lot of issues at the company. Having a better price could make us think about using more cloud products for Oracle and increase usage.

We're were amazed at the ease Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud was to implement and how good the design was. The integration with other Oracle products is very good. We highly recommend using this solution as a cloud product.

I rate Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud an eight out of ten.

There is always a chance to improve a product.

The most valuable features are the Planning forums, the ability to do all sorts of translation, and the ability to move data about with relative ease if the coding isn't too difficult.

I would like to see instant dynamic calculations and more out of the box functionality within Planning. I would also like to see a feature with HFM and Planning to move data more frequently and easily. The tuning of the Hyperion Planning applications is not intuitive or well-documented, and that has been a major drawback that was addressed in HFM, but not yet in Planning to my knowledge.

FDM, however, is really clunky, difficult to use and slower than it should be. When you map data, you have to manually tell the system what to clear or it will take forever. For large scalability applications, FDM is really lacking.

We have been using Planning for five years.

Stability didn't exist on level 120, but on level 122 we're very stable. There are no issues.

We are hoping that the hybrid that is being created will fit meet our company’s needs going forward. The limitation right now is in the ability to do dynamic calculations instantaneously.

The support at Oracle is just terrible. When you call, it takes a couple days to get a response, and the answers and questions you get back are not well thought-out. In fact, they are often just nonsense. If you have all the components, support should be able to pull them up. They had a few good people that we used to work with, but they left.

In level 122, creating a new cube is very difficult. I'm hoping that in level 124 it will be much easier. It should be more straightforward for the end users. As is, it’s a little too geared towards IT professionals.

While it’s definitely the market leader for HFM, I’m not sure I would say the same for Planning because the architecture could be more advanced. I would look at the competitors, but I do like Planning, and I would rate it a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for creating financials.

The product has a direct plugin to Microsoft Excel. The ease of pulling in data and reporting and ease of getting quickly at data at different levels is great.

The solution can scale.

The initial setup isn't too difficult.

The stability and performance are good.

I definitely preferred Hyperion in the way it was organized compared to this product. I understand this solution is more of a budgeting tool, and so they've put their consolidation tool under that. Due to the fact that it's a space cube, for smaller companies like ours, the way that Hyperion was a relational database worked better for reporting.

Some of the things in this product are just too cumbersome and we don't need them and they make it harder to do certain things, or certain things have to have more specific names or descriptions. You have to put in strange characters that make it look not as sleek.

It would be nice if we had an option when using the ad hoc querying to see a member name and the description. In this solution, you can't pull both, you can only pull one or the other, and sometimes that's confusing. If you want an account, you might want to see the account number and the account name. That's super helpful to those of us in accounting and reporting, however, that's not currently an option. You can only pick one or the other right now. If they could somehow add that, that would be fantastic.

I've used the solution for about two years.

The stability has been great. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Its performance is good.

The product is scalable.

In some ways, HFM could handle more members within a dimension as it didn't need to copy or consolidate at every intersection point. Only the ones with values. This product, the way it's a cube, limits you and maybe how many members you can have within a dimension. However, in other ways, it's probably more scalable to do more. It just depends on what your purpose is.

I do not directly deal with technical support. I'm not in IT, so I don't directly deal with any of the tech support. Somebody more on the IT side would go through that.

We used to use Oracle Hyperion. I used it for so much longer, and therefore feel that Hyperion is easier to use. It's more intuitive, a little more streamlined. That's specifically reporting. If somebody was using it for planning, it probably was not as strong in that arena.

The initial setup is more complicated than HFM (Hyperion) was. That said, it was fine.

I'm not involved in the licensing aspect. I don't know how much it costs.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

The solution, being a cloud deployment, is always on the latest version.

The best advice would be to sit down and really talk about what the end goal is of what you want it to look like. Sometimes in sales meetings, you're told it can do certain things, and it can in fact do those things, however, not in the way you're envisioning it doing. Therefore, just have a clear picture of how long they're going to take or what that's really going to entail. When you're implementing it, you might need to actually consider a few different approaches than maybe the way you need it to look. It'll do it, just not the way you want it to.

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

I think the biggest value of the Oracle Planning & Budget Cloud Service is to accelerate a client to bring up their planning and budgeting solution online, because it is a cloud deployment option. Therefore, IT departments don't have to ramp up on strategies as they relate to infrastructure, training, and skills.

For an organization considering an EPM planning solution, they'll want a quick cloud deployment of P&BCS and run with it. They'll need an implementation partner if they don't have the skills to onboard that type of system. The quickness of the implementation is really where the value is.

The biggest improvement for us is that it's defined our processes. It provides us with out-of-the-box cloud for P&BCS that's a clean slate we can work on to build our business. It also allows us to not have to invest in unnecessary IT and infrastructure footprint. It provides analytics and enterprise performance management as well.

Any new issues we have are really built up over time. With what we have, P&BCS caters to most of our requirements and our on-premise software. But there are some limitations. For example, the Attributes feature doesn't do cross-tab reporting baed on KPI. I believe that future versions will have it, so you have to be mindful as you design and build around it.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We haven't had any issues with stability.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

Tickets are easily resolved, especially when they come from a client of the subscriber. I'm an implementer, but the subscriber who's paying subscription fees logs the tickets. The SLAs require support to be very prompt. Also, because this is a cloud product, Oracle wants to be very successful, so they've been making efforts to have a high level of technical support.

If you have an already existing on-premise planning application, it's quick because you just move it to the cloud. Considering that all the construct capabilities available in the P&BCS deployment option meet your planning requirements, it's a pretty straightforward setup.

But when there's a new client, the first out-of-the-gate benefit is your IT infrastructure and you're not engaged on that level. You don't have to do upgrades because the cloud will do it for you. We take the spreadsheets and their planning cycle and we built it.

We segregate the deployment into three phases. The first, laying the foundation, is the biggest, which takes three months. Next, is a one-month period of enhancements to functionality and build-out. Finally, we automate everything so that we just push a button and everything works.

Sometimes we've had to get Oracle's help. Otherwise, it's very straightforward and easy.

If you're a net new client, talk to your peers who are in the same industry. Have they deployed the Hyperion solution? What kind of deployment option was there? Was it an on-premise, or was it cloud? Talk to them, and then get in touch with your vendors. Get in touch with your Oracle representative. Work with them. They will help you, because they in turn are trying to help ourselves. We all are.

It makes it easy for users to get through and see what they have to do next. There are caveats though, and it’s not all positive. Things happen behind the scenes with the input forms that are riddled with negatives.

They could change the current web forms. You can’t stroll seamless down them because they jump. You can’t control F anymore to find something on a large form as well. I don’t like the way they changed the POV and header too. The drop down options to click are gray, as if you aren’t supposed to touch them, but the top bar that you actually are not supposed to touch is black. The hierarchy of going through a task list and forms also has issues; if you click the little right arrow, it opens, but then the items on the lowest levels still have those arrows. When you click them, nothing happens, because there is nothing beneath them, but the arrows are still there. They are like file cabinets and folders but the cabinet is inside the folder rather than the folder being inside the cabinet. It doesn’t make sense. When you click something in a task, sometimes a different one opens up and expands instead.

I’ve used Planning for four years.

It is more stable than the last product I used.

I don’t like this version, but it might get better. I think our company should have gone with an Excel based tool. I would rate it a five out of ten.