PeopleSoft Reviews

We're a consulting company, therefore, we get involved in all kinds of use cases.

PeopleSoft is used for usually larger organizations and some middle tier. However, usually, organizations that are maybe 2000 employees or two and a half billion dollars or more tend to be users. They use it primarily for back-office systems, finance supply chain, human resources, payroll benefits, that kind of stuff. That includes recruiting and everything associated with HCM. It's one of the primary ERP systems.

The most valuable feature is that it's wide and broad and it does about everything anybody needs in a major organization from a back-office systems point of view. 

It's a mature product. I've been using it since 1994. It came out maybe a few years before that. It's matured over the years to where, from a back-office system point of view in those primary areas, if you want an all-inclusive system, you can do almost anything you need to do with PeopleSoft without having to buy other third party systems to bolt on to it.

They continue to improve and support the product. The latest announcement was that they're going to continue to support it through 2032. However, every year they add a year or two to that. They confirm their outgoing support for 10 years almost every year.

It's a real contrast between things like Workday and Oracle cloud. The biggest challenge we see as consultants from an Oracle cloud and Workday point of view is that you cannot customize those systems to better fit your business processes. Companies that are smaller and that are less complex tend to go with Oracle and Workday. The big advantage there is they don't have to do any upgrades. However, they're almost forced into the changes if there are new versions for these cloud systems. The good news is you don't have to upgrade them. The bad news is it may not support all your business processes as you want. Therefore, you have to change your business processes to fit the software.

The biggest disadvantage with things like PeopleSoft is that they do continuous support and fixes and upgrades. You get to choose when you want to implement that upgrade. However, in order to keep up, you have to upgrade. The biggest challenge with PeopleSoft is it's a trade-off between feature functionality and the pain of going through those upgrades. And when you upgrade, you've got to do some work. You have to look at what's available in the new version, figure out whether we're going to use that or not, and turn it on or not. On top of that, it's got to go through an implementation process.

Most people do about one upgrade per year. Some people do two, and some people get way behind. However, in order to take advantage of what they buy and pay for, they need to really do probably at least one upgrade a year. And it's a minor upgrade. It's not the kind of upgrade we used to think of that people did once every five years that was almost a reimplementation. In upgrade terms, it's a minor upgrade, however, it is an upgrade.

The difference in PeopleSoft and cloud version is the trade-off between not being able to do any customization and being forced into upgrades almost monthly. You don't have a chance to take your time. You don't have a choice when you do it. It just happens.

Within the company, we've been dealing with PeopleSoft for 15 years. I personally have been dealing with PeopleSoft going back to 1994. I have many, many years of experience working with it.

I would say their tech support is good. I don't have a problem there. They've been doing this a long time, so they know how to do it.

I've also used SAP - and have about five years of experience with it.

The software comes with a fee, with a license fee. The upgrade software comes with a license fee. However, it takes their staff time and resources to go through that. Sometimes customers will hire a consultant firm like us to help them get through it. That would be an extra cost, technically speaking.

The cost varies by license and license type. Many times, it's so much per user, and depending on which software modules you're using. It depends on the modules you're using and how many users you have using that module.

Some people buy what may be called an enterprise-wide license, where it's not really based on the number of users. You get more of a flat cost for that and the users may not be impacted. I haven't gotten involved in that in a while, therefore, I'm not sure how it works.

We're a PeopleSoft partner. We're primarily an Oracle and are a PeopleSoft consultancy where we implement and help people use the PeopleSoft systems. Now we're combining that with UiPath, and so most of the things we do are going to be PeopleSoft system related.

Having been in this business for 25 years or so, my biggest advice for PeopleSoft clients would be the same for any software client - that whenever they implement it, that they do it right and not try to do it cheaply.

Once they do it right, they will realize the benefit from doing it right forever, from then on. If they do it on the cheap to take shortcuts, they will pay the price for taking those shortcuts until they get around to making the investment to fix it. Customers are often a victim of themselves by trying to do it too cheap.

For example, I had one large enterprise client that asked their consulting firm how long it was going to take to put in PeopleSoft. They were putting in about everything PeopleSoft offers. It was a major implementation for the financial supply chain, human resources, payroll benefits, all that stuff. They had something like 130,000 people. It was a big, big corporation.

The consultant company came back and said, "Probably two years, maybe as soon as 18 months, but probably two years to get it implemented and into production from the time we actually start." The company came back and gave them six months, and the implementation was a disaster. The company tried to blame it on the consulting firm. However, they said, "Hey, man, you gave us six months and we should have taken two years for an organization of your size and complexity."

That's a little more than typical. Lots of times people will, instead of 18 months, take 12 months or 15 months. The more they try to shortcut the implementation, the more problems they create for themselves.

The biggest advantage - whether they're doing PeopleSoft, SAP - et cetera - for software companies and the clients, if they're going to put in a major software system, don't try to do it the cheapest you can. Do it the best you can. If you do that, it will pay off in spades. If you don't, it will screw you. That's the biggest advice I would have.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

A valuable feature is FSCM.

Provides fluid interfaces.

I would like to see better support, bug fixing, and documentation.

We have been using this solution for 15 years.

There were issues with deployment.

There were issues with stability.

There were issues with scalability.

I would give customer service a rating of 5/10.

I would give technical support a rating of 5/10.

The implementation was done in-house.

The most valuable feature of PeopleSoft Procurement is the completely end-to-end integration of the procurement process. From the time you set up the master data information and set up the contracts, you are able to create transactions.

• Visibility on spend. Spend is one of the big factors; it's your bottom line.
• A lot of compliance; all the audit information, like when you do the transactions.

There should be more analytics, monitoring analytics, and also machine learning should be incorporated into the core product. Right now, machine learning is outside of the ERP domain; bring machine learning into the domain.

It's pretty stable.

Scalability is pretty good.

When we get technical support from Oracle, as far as the response is concerned, we are pleased. Based on the SLA, we get a response back. It also depends on the fix. If the fix is available, we get that response back. If it's a bug, it takes longer. We don't know how long it's going to be or how long it's going to take to fix the bug.

We looked at Ariba.

We decided to go with PeopleSoft because of the functionality and its ability to integrate not only procurement, but also with the finance and the HRMS.

It's a pretty user-friendly product. It's intuitive. You can figure a lot of things out on your own.

The user interface that I use is very intuitive, it’s to the point of what I want to use it for. For what I have, it provides me the right fields and gives me some predictive information as well, which helps in my day to day job.

There's a feed that comes up from Twitter and the social forums that helps me make myself available to customers, and then searching digitally into the Google and so on. That's pretty informative when I log in for my day-to-day work. That's a very welcoming feature.

If they could provide reports for various organizations, especially global ones. Currently, the report fields are mostly US centric, and do not support other regions. That would be a nice feature to add. I think I’m looking for more data validitation.

I am a user. From my perspective, as long as it is running on weekdays, it's fine. So far, I think my company is doing a good job in keeping it up and running.

My organization is actually growing at 20% YOY for the last 16 years. Over that time, it means a lot of new sales people are being added to the system. I haven't seen any change in responsiveness or change in the performance. The stability's in place without any impact to the performance.

I can contact the service desk, which is run globally, over the phone or via the ticketing tool and then they can look into the technical issues. If I have questions about the navigation or if there are any new features that have been rolled out, those are the guys to contact.

I'm at my current organization for the last 10 years. When I came onboard, they were using spreadsheets. There was a very good reason to avoid the manual work. Spreadsheets get lost all the time; they sit in mailboxes and pile up. I struggled with that for a couple of years before we moved to a nice product and that really helped. There was an urgent need. I think that need has been largely met. I'm not saying that it's the best product on the market, but it's still doing good, to me.

As I'm a user, I remember providing my input on what do I want to see in the product. That happens at the start of launching the product, as well as when the new roll out happens or the planning happens. In that sense, I'm involved in terms of the configuration, layout of the fields, providing user feedback. All of that has been taken into account.

As I’ve mentioned, I was involved in terms of providing end user feedback and rating the products. I think we looked at three or four products. Some were boutique and some were large ones, the Oracles and the SAPs of the world. After a proper, objective evaluation exercise, we went with PeopleSoft.

I think the evaluation criteria that we used was pretty good. If I had a colleague that was looking at this kind of solution, I would provide them information about what I’ve learned from the product evaluation exercise, the product and the option exercise, in terms of the importance of reinforcing the training element, so they can use it correctly and so on. Hopefully, a new user would gain perspective from that.

When I’m looking at a vendor such as Oracle, I think it's important to be in sync with the latest trends in the market, especially in the CRM area. There's an on-the-cloud feature, so say that causes a big thing in the market about that and there's a heavy customer option on it. I'm really hoping that they can catch up on the trend. As a user, I have a lot of familiarity with the existing product. I don't want to unlearn and relearn a new product. That's the main thing.

I'm a happy user. My rating reflects that I think there's always area for improvement. With the new tech plans and so on, there are quite a few things that PeopleSoft or Oracle can do with the product.

• Search engine (like Google)
• Mobile app
• Self service
• Performance
• Others

For example, any time you need to search information for any employee, you do not need to navigate through different screens and menus. You just type any information about the person and you can start to navigate. It's very practical and saves a lots of time. Its also easier for employees that only access the application one or two times per month.

It improved payroll calculations and control, employee visibility, self service, and other areas.

Reports can definitely be improved. There are very few core reports. Every time you have a request for information, you need to customize a report. It would be great to have a report generator that could bring more flexibility and speed to delivering information to end users.

I have used it for more than five years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. (We use it for almost 100K employees.)

I rate technical support 5/10.

We previously used a different solution and we switched due to internal developments.

Initial setup was complex.

I was not at the company at the time, but I know they evaluated other local solutions before choosing this product.

Be careful with consulting. We have had a difficult time identifying consultants in Latin America (mostly in Brazil).

Our end process is going through multiple procure-to-pay systems. So the most valuable feature of PeopleSoft is the collaboration that it provides between our procurement/purchasing and accounts payable.

Because it links our procurement/purchasing and accounts payable, we have a single way to track transactions.

PCM, the procurement side, is weak and is far from the strongest product. It leaves a lot to be desired with the integration of the contract management module along with the purchasing. There isn't really a strong way to allow folks within the organization view access to contracts without bringing that down to low-level security. It's just not flexible.

I've been with my current company for five years, and we implemented v9.2 in January 2014. Personally, I've used it for a number of years.

We've haven't had issues deploying it.

With our current implementation, we have some instability. But, I believe that that's something we'll overcome over time. Otherwise, it a mostly stable product, though there is still room for improvement in many areas.

As we've acquired companies, it's certainly been scalable for what we do with it. We've been able to integrate all of the pieces of the implementations back to new parts of our organization.

7/10 - Response time sometimes on what we consider critical issues to us isn't as fast as we'd like, especially with v9.2. We went in flat with 9.2.0, so there were a lot of bugs and things that we didn't realize were bugs until we called Oracle. Sometimes it was days waiting to find out if the issues we had had something to do to our system or whether it was with the product.

We've had a really excellent customer experience with it because of two main features -- it's easy to upgrade and it interfaces well with other systems. Ease-of-upgrade is important because we need to maintain the our workflow without the interruption of waiting for the system to upgrade. And we have other applications we run, so it's important that PeopleSoft can interface with them and everything works together.

There are a couple of areas for improvement, including better overall performance as well as an even quicker update process so that we have as minimal of downtime as possible. Again, it's very important that we maintain our workflow.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been stable. We haven't had any issues with instability.

It scales as we need and we haven't had any issues when it comes to not being able to scale.

We're in touch with Oracle support often. When we've created cases, the service has been very good. It's very consistent across all the Oracle products we use. Support is centralized in one location, so our service from them is consistently good.

The setup was easy and straightforward.

It’s a very robust and mature product, and perhaps it’s the first HCM product that came out onto the market. It integrates very well with our existing infrastructure, and even though we try not to customize it very much, it is very customizable, which fits our business needs very well. Flexibility is very good for us.

This is a very customizable tool. Whenever my company has a unique need, I am able to quickly use this product to adapt to it.

I think this is coming along as we speak, but mobility isn’t the greatest. PeopleSoft on mobile devices has been a bit of an issue, but now there’s a new interface that is able to better function for that need. It’s still in initial stages, but that’s one area that I see for improvement.

Over 10 years.

I wasn’t the one who initially deployed it, as I’ve been here for less than 10 years. However, I deployed PeopleSoft seven years ago. Whenever we deploy anything there’s always some problems, but no big issues.

No, I don’t think so.

No, I also don’t think so. Just last week we deployed something new and we had no issues.

It's great, 8/10.

Good, overall. Very good.

No, PeopleSoft was one of the first of its kind, so I’ve personally never used any other product.

No, PeopleSoft was the first of its kind.

You need to analyze what the current state of your company is and consider what your needs are. PeopleSoft is definitely a great product though.