Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

Easy in implementation.

Maybe the contract, which is too complicated.

Six years.

None, but some issues with the Java launching.

Sometimes, yes.

It is good.

No.

No, none at all. We did start with two products, but it was not perfect in terms of integration.

Oracle licencing is very complex, and the pricing is too expensive .

No, it was strategic to go with Oracle.

Oracle has a low risk in implementation against all other products.

The system is reliable and the backbone of financial and other core systems in many organizations worldwide.

It has improved our business processes.

• Interfaces (downstream and upstream)
• End user interface (UX design)
• Performance
• The EBS Design to some extent is still monolithic.
• Maintenance activities still require a lot downtime.

I have used the solution for five years.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Satisfactory.

Support on Unix platforms is good.

I used Oracle Applications 11.0.3. This was an upgrade (out of place) to 12c.

It is very complex as its tightly coupled with business processes and also involves a very large number of interfaces.

Vendor plus in-house.

As the brand name says, Enterprise Resource Planning, and that's all. It offers integration for all business areas in one database.

I would like to see improvement in the overall UI.

We have been using this for more than 20 years.

Technical support is fair.

Valuable features include expense management and the accounting suite of products.

It has improved our efficiency and time to market.

I would like to see more automation.

There were no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

We used a home-grown solution.

The setup was moderate.

We implemented through an SI.

The ROI has yet to be calculated.

Be careful.

We evaluated SAP.

It is better to work out the requirements properly and minimize the customizations.

It's quite secure and fast, and we get an end-to-end solution.

Whenever you are growing, you get new products on the database server level, application server level and software. It definitely grows as your needs increase.

They started on the mobile app and tablets, but still I see there are no short-forms used in EBS, which are not I’m seeing coming on the tablet. Maybe increasing that will help because now everyone carries their tablets and handheld devices. You don’t need to go back to your seat and do anything if you are in the store or anything: warehouse.

You don’t need to spend time going back from there, you can solve the issue.

I’ve been using it for the past 13 years (approximately).

I started using Oracle applications from around 2003, from version 11.9 onwards. I have done some work on 10.7 as well, and from there, onwards.

It’s quite stable. Wherever you have issues you can get some patches on a one-off. We have CPU half-yearly and all those kind of things that makes it like whatever known issues, you can get rid of those beforehand.

No.

Overall, support is good. Earlier, we used to have MetaLink, now we have support with Oracle.com. We can pay the Support Representative or we can find so many documents and all that, but still there is a thing if you need anything development related, then SRs and getting solution may take up to years of time. That is a kind of thing I’d like to get rid of.

If a person is knowledgeable, it’s good enough.

Definitely I’d say data and different application, new servers and 12c and Database, all these have very cool features and In-Memory and EBR.

They should use these things more to get the most out of the solution.

Primarily, performance and responsiveness, and also, good support.

I'm basically an administrator, so I don't know much about the business functionality, but I feel it's a very cool technology to manage the financials, payroll, manufacturing units, et cetera.

I don't think so. As far as I know, it's doing its best in pretty much all the areas. As of now, I can't tell anything.

For the past six years I've been working as an administrator for Oracle E-Business Suite.

I believe it's pretty stable. I think it's one of the best ERPs available as of today.

I think they're pretty responsive.

Basically, most of the time, usually we go through the normal process of creating a service request, and at times, if there is a major issue or any critical problem, they would step in and they personally help out the customer.

I would definitely encourage anybody to start using the E-Business Suite as an ERP solution. I think most of the companies are using it. Oracle applications are so popular that many customers are already using it.

The most valuable features are straight-through processing because we need to make sure that we have a good end-to-end process. The biggest thing that we also look for is the ability to easily research invoices, where you can attach to the specific invoice line item the detailed payments, etc. We look at it as our biggest factor.

It's important that we can constantly be able to monitor what we've spent relative to the government's money. We always make sure that we have everything in proper order since it is not our physical money. It is somebody else's.

We are an integrated contractor, which basically means that we are contracted by the United States government to operate a program specific to their needs, and to ensure that the program is spending their money correctly, and to make sure that we come in on-budget or even under-budget for the government. We would definitely need to ensure that whatever we do is very much in line with all of the government polices and regulations. We need to ensure that a software that we utilize adheres to that.

The biggest thing that we utilize EBS for is mainly Finance and HRMS. Those are our two biggest modules that we utilize within EBS. So we want to make sure that whatever we are utilizing it for will be easy for the employee to gain access to say, their HR data, or for our acquisition management department to be able to see where the invoice stands in the process of being paid. Those are just a couple of examples.

It is still a little outdated as far as what we consider a twenty-first century software. You're still using Oracle forms, that sort of thing. Payables is a prime example: there's the web interface and then the forms interface and we hate having to switch between the two areas. To create a simple report, at least in my opinion, sometimes requires a developer versus just me, as the user, going in and doing what I need to do. It's extremely difficult to do some data mining on a whim. If there's something repetitive in nature, then we can set it up with a developer, it works, but in our opinion we know that things could work better than the way they are currently.

We've really had no issues with deployment.

The current version that we're on, which is 12.2.4, is decently stable. However, the problem is that the system doesn't allow for us to have a lot of users on it. The hardware that we have is able to run beautifully when there's not a lot of people on. I equate it to, 'The machine's a Ferrari, you can't tow a boat with a Ferrari.' Essentially, the system will go fast when it's allowed to go fast, without the bogging down of users, but that's one of our problems right now. It seems to be that multiple users on the system have caused a lot of back-log.

So far, it seems like we can do a lot of things with EBS relative to customizations. We don't seem to have any real restriction in that area. But some things like, me as the cash manager, setting up banks tends to be a lot more cumbersome than it should be. There seems to be a lot more involvement with doing those types of basic things than they should be in the real-world sense. It seems to be a little bit more like it was geared towards a developer to set up the bank rather than a professional.

Since I'm not the support side of things in the organization, I don't directly deal with technical support, but there are people, such as DBAs and developers, who have been in talks with Oracle about some of the issues. They didn't seem like they had any real problems other than some of the solutions are a little slow to come about. It could be because our organization is very unique, some of the solutions that might need to happen could be a little bit more involved with trying to develop a solution that we need. I don't think we've had a situation, however, where we weren't able to get the needed support.

I wasn't actually at the company at the time, but for upgrades for which I've been apart, they did seem to be a little bit more difficult. A lot of it could be on our end, mainly because of how we do a lot of customizations. We had to do these customizations, unfortunately, because E-Business Suite didn't allow for a specific industry like ours to have more to an 'out-of-the-box'-type of developed software. There was a lot of customization. Now, they have improved from version to version, but for our business, we're still very much away from being cloud-based. Our software sits on a non-internet network. It really is hard for us as an organization to sometimes do business in the environment of, 'Everyone wants to move to an internet system', i.e. the cloud. There are organizations such as ours that have trouble at this point being on an internet-based system.

With our customizations, it stopped a lot of the upgrade that we just had last year. When we did the upgrade, a lot of these customizations were a constant battle where one would not work, another would work, and then when you'd fix one, something else would happen. There were a lot of issues, which we are, as an organization, trying to pull away from customizations. Oracle has not really been geared a lot towards what our line of business was. We have to do a lot of customizations in order to allow for that software to work as we need.

Minimize your customizations if you can. If not, get a lot of training because a lot of the screens are not as intuitive. I'm kind of a rare breed, I guess, as I do have some 'IT sense', so I can maneuver through screens, but when it comes to other people in my group who are really not 'IT minded' at all, they're usually asking me for help when there are some set-ups in their own modules. Setting up is the biggest key, and if you mess that up it's going to propagate the rest of your EBS experience, so you need to have a proper set-up.

The functional knowledge is the most valuable feature. Oracle EBS has many different problems, but I think the main feature is the functionality, how it works together. You can probably find other products that work with Oracle database, but because that’s their own product, EBS tightly integrates with it. I think that's the most valuable thing.

We needed to use financial software, anyway. I think it comes from the historical fact that we had Oracle software; we always had Oracle Database. So, from a licensing point of view, it made perfect sense. It integrates well.

We have a very strong presence from the PL/SQL developers point of view. We have good resources. We have a lot of in-house developed software and it has to integrate with Oracle. We do a lot of invoicing and so on feeding into the Oracle EBS system from our in-house system.

It was natural. The system is naturally a good fit, actually.

Their UI is not the best. It is an area with room for improvement, big time. I think they can go completely out of Java, the applet version. If they make it completely browser driven, like HTML and so on, that will be the best. Today, once in a while, it'll get out of sync. You don't have the latest version of Java. It uploads a whole slew of Java products and applets, which is very heavy-duty stuff. It doesn’t have to be.

These days, actually, everybody uses HTML-related stuff. They have started using it. It's a mix of both, actually, but they're not there yet. That's why you see a lot of other products that complement it.

I met one company at an Oracle conference that did just the re-skinning, just because their skin is not up to the mark; there's a lot of outdated stuff.

I would say 12.1, we upgraded two years ago. At this point, we are a little bit stable. We do have sometimes hanging systems, but I think it's mostly stable now.

We do have some problems sometimes, but we are a small shop, we have 35-40 users, so it's not a huge shop. If you have a 200-something, or 500, users, I think they definitely would have issues. Personally, I haven't encountered many problems.

Once in a while, I'll have some problems. I'll have to restart the system. If it's in the middle of the day, we have all the users get kicked out, and then just a restart. It doesn't happen that often.

It was not easy to set up.

That's actually one of the reasons we use Salesforce; we're loving it. We use Salesforce for our sales and marketing; no software, no maintenance. I have only a 2-3-person team. I myself oversee the department. I have one developer and one support person. Effectively, that support person is not even 100%, so he probably uses 20% of our time, maybe sometimes a little more than that. The developer is very rarely used. If you add all these three persons, it's not even one person who is actually managing the entire team.

Oracle, oh, my God. I have a team for hardware; you need some Oracle-related hardware stuff. Of course, they're not only doing the Oracle stuff, but you have to have someone. We have an Oracle apps DBA. I'm outsourcing that one. I have a functional guy; he uses 25% of his time now, but at one point, he was using 50% of his time. We also have our in-house PL/SQL developer. You can see how many people. It’s a lot of resources. Oh, man.

Upgrading is a nightmare. I mean, I shouldn’t describe it as a nightmare, but I get nervous whenever they upgrade. It's a lot of work; a lot of coordination; a lot of testing and all those things.

If it was in the cloud, I wouldn't worry about any of those things.

We did look at other products. We did look at Workday, and Salesforce also has a product called FinancialForce. Actually, the Workday partners are very, very expensive. They force you to choose one of their suggested partners; Oracle doesn't have that problem. I get it dirt cheap from somebody from India, Brazil, or somebody else, and I can get it done. As much as Workday’s licensing costs, it costs as much for doing the implementation. I wouldn't do that, but maybe there are companies who will do that. If I have to do that, no, not in the route, unless there is some overwhelming benefit in the 5-7 year timeframe.

We also looked at NetSuite, but not as much as Workday. We actually were thinking of doing more on that, but we didn't have anybody come to our site to show that.
With FinancialForce, they had some other comment there that they would not be pursuing that direction. We didn't feel comfortable that they would keep it for a long time or not.

You have to have patience, and be willing to spend more time due to the fact that eventually it pays off. Sometimes, the first impression is the best impression. Oracle EBS is not that. The first impression might be terribly bad, but once you get through there, you dig deeper, you'll get your money's worth.

They are not super efficient in the cloud business yet. They are getting there. We are using it on-premises. Fusion is the cloud-based offering for EBS. We never went that route. We're not comfortable yet.