Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

It matches with our requirements and pulls the data from an instance that is nowhere related to the Oracle Applications; it pulls out exactly what we require.

In one shot, we know what is happening. For example, if someone submits something from Salesforce, it immediately shows what the outcome. This data you can either transmit or not transmit. In this way, it is helping not only us but the customers as well.

We didn't go with the standard features of the Oracle SOA Suite in which the Oracle APIs were included; these APIs we wrote on our own. That might be the issue for us. If we had to use the standard ones, which were a part of the Oracle SOA Suite, it could have been better for us.

Rarely, we have experienced any downtime issues. That might be because of the DBS alerts that are missing.

It has scaled a little to our needs. I would give it a 6/10 rating for its scalability.

When we have to open a ticket with the technical support, it is resolved in a timely manner. However, for this purpose, we are not using the Oracle SOA support team; instead, we are using RemedyForce, which is a part of SFDC.

We did not look at any other solutions before because we got an analysis done by the Oracle team itself. They analyzed everything and recommended it to us.

I'm really happy with this product.

There is a new software called MuleSoft that has come up and is similar to this product. I want to review it to see if it is better than this one. I have heard it is more simple to deploy than the Oracle SOA Suite.

This is our ERP and we are using it for our entire supply chain flow, i.e., from the start of the billing to the shipping process. We are using the Oracle E-Business Suite for mainly our supply chain management.

We are looking for improvement in the response time that we get.

In addition, we are not getting regular updates in terms of their patches. Many times, we log a SR and then we get a response from Oracle that they need to apply a patch. Thus, if they can inform us ahead of time for such issues, it will really help.

I have been using this product for more than 10 years.

It's quite stable. We have had no downtime. It's working fine. It's quite stable for us.

We are looking for more scalability. It should be more scalable.

The support at Oracle is good. It's not very good but good.

The Oracle support is through the Oracle MetaLink, where you open up the Oracle SR and then get the support needed. For this, we spend at least a day or two to provide them with information and it is time consuming. Hence, I think it's good.

However, in case of any urgency, we need to go with the escalation route to get the support that is needed and need to go over the issue with them. We need to struggle in terms of getting the right support. They have support in both the US and Indian time zones. Sometimes, we don't get the right support person in the Oracle SR call and that is also one of the struggles that we have with Oracle.

It is straightforward and quite good. In the Oracle application, we don't have an issue with that.

We are looking for reliability whilst selecting a vendor. They should be more knowledgeable in the supply chain area. They should have proper knowledge in the domain area and that's what we look for.

The most valuable features are the records management, procurement, and inventory.

I have been using it for several years.

We have not had any downtime.

It is very scalable. It will grow as my company grows.

I would recommend this product.

Basically, the most valuable feature is the suite; basically, your integration between APAR, PO, fixed assets. We're using Financials.

Again, integration: The reason I'm mentioning this is, basically, you can have an ERP ordering system, and it doesn't have to be Oracle. Also, it's not really an ordering system; it's not friendly, for that matter.

Maybe more real-time; that would probably be better.

I have been using it for about 15 years. The company has had it maybe four years.

It's fairly stable. We haven't really had any big issues.

We believe it is scalable. We certainly have to change our process, and maybe have to acquire more products, but we think Oracle will be able to provide all of our needs.

Technical support is OK. They're no better or no worse than other companies. You have to know what to do. Basically, for us, when we go to support, we're prepared. We make sure we have all our data – from our financial system or whatever – ready, so we will save time.

However, we do find, sometimes, depending on the time of the day, if you open the support ticket with Oracle, let's say, if you're doing it in the afternoon, or late afternoon, then it actually goes to Asia-Pacific. That problem, basically, is that you won't get any updates in the morning, if we try to. You would get something in the afternoon. If it's not urgent, maybe that's OK, but we'd like to have something, basically, in the same time zone, at least.

For one thing, there are not many things available out there. Oracle bought them all, basically. Oracle is basically a local company for us. It's pretty easy to use, so that was another one of the reasons. Also, at the time, my company was trying to go IPO. They couldn’t really claim all the financials from the spreadsheets. You have to have some kind of ERP system, so Oracle was one of the options.

Initial setup really depends on the module. It’s not very consistent, I think because different people have developed the different modules. You have to get used to it.

When we are selecting a vendor to work with, we look for a couple of things. One simple thing: basically, it has to be logical. Meaning that, whatever application's there, it makes sense to use. Also, it should be easy to implement and easy to support. Hopefully, it will work with our other systems. We also look at ease of use.

Oracle E-Business Suite is a financial and accounting reporting tool that we use for accounts payable, creating invoices, and accounts receivable. We process a lot of transactions, so the greatest benefit is that all manual activities are being automated. We don't have to spend hours to generate invoices and accounting reports. All the manual insurance processes have been automated, making it easy for the business to handle day-to-day business activities.

I think the standard reports in the AR and the GM modules need improvement. I would like to see a few new reports, including customized reports and summaries.

We have been using Oracle for almost five years.

Oracle E-Business Suite is quite stable. We did have some challenges when we when we started, but now it is more or less stable. The system was not initially optimized to find the transaction database. When we upgraded our systems in May, it took almost two to three months before our Oracle E-Business Suite implementation matched the business systems. Now everything is working smoothly.

We use technical support very often. We open service requests, and if the ticket level is a seven, we see a good response. They need to improve on their turnaround time on the Sev 2 and Sev 3 service requests.

We used to be PeopleSoft, which was a financial system, and it was not meeting all our business requirements, and was not scalable. That's why we switched to Oracle. Additionally, Oracle is more compatible with PeopleSoft than SAP.

When we introduced Oracle E-Business Suite, I was part of the implementation team. We used to be PeopleSoft, so I was part of the PeopleSoft internal auditing team, and I was also involved with the upgrade. The new implementation was very challenging because we needed to do a lot of customization. There were also many new business requirements at that point in time. But, when we later performed an upgrade, it was not too complex.

We did evaluate SAP, but found Oracle to be more compatible with our financial systems.

Our most important criteria is that the applications be more customer centered, and that manual activities are automated.

Oracle E-Business Suite is a very awesome product. It has a lot of capabilities, and you can gain a lot of business knowledge through it.

For us, the most valuable feature is that we have one database, one instance; yet we operate in more than six countries across the world, so it makes it easy for us to run with a very small IT staff.

Its features are good, but I think they need to look around at the other products in the market. There are a few industry standard features which are missing from this product. We are discussing one of these with them where synchronizing calendars across different countries is a big thing.

On the reporting side, they should give financial reports more in AxelBase to filter and sort data to make it faster and easier to close the books.

The other area is definitely the support side. Turnaround time needs to be faster. They need to improve working with the end user, and asking very specific questions to help resolve an issue. People should collect different types of information before sending the problem back and forth.

As a company, we've been using it for five years.

It didn't start that way; but at this point, it's pretty stable. Don’t forget there were improvements in the reporting side, the performance side, and in the UI experience.

I would say that it is scalable.

I have good and bad experiences with Oracle support. Sometimes it's very difficult to open up an SR, to keep it open, and to get a timely answer when you need it. It feels like everything has to be marked severity 1, critical, 24/7: sometimes in order for it to get something done. They might have heard that a lot, obviously.

We often have problems if we have to cross teams. If I have a problem, and then all of a sudden they decide, "That's receivables," so now you have to open a separate ticket with receivables. Receivables work differently than everyone else, so you're going to have to prioritize it higher and make it 24/7. It can be frustrating sometimes that all the support teams don't work similarly.

It's okay, but the real pain comes when you're moving from one area to another. Configuring the APR system is not that easy and it is not easy to get something out of it that you configured. You need to keep on working on an environment’s configuration to bring it up to speed. Now, you're sure this environment is all up-to-date, and everything is working fine. Now, we need to move into the next environment where people are going to test the system.

Currently, there is no automation for migrating an entire configuration to a different instance. You need to manually resolve all the errors. It is very difficult to even identify where and what went wrong. If you are really senior, and you have a lot of experience working on it, then it might easy for you to go and see, "We are missing that."

It would also benefit from a full-fledged comparison when something went wrong. If we could run something that will identify, "Here is the configuration here.This is a mismatch." That would also work well.

We have a lot of modules such as finance, receivables, and so on. The end-to-end flow is there. The features that Oracle has provided are good as an end-to-end solution. We use that and it's good, actually.

They have provided a lot of front-end programs, with which we can import data from different systems. Data from various systems comes through a single system. Then, from that data, we can generate the reports. That one single system gets data from many downstream systems.

The main thing is, if you want additional functions or any customization, you can also do that on top of the product. That route is more beneficial.

With reports, we have various options. We can generate reports in a particular format, and so on, with various options.

Right now, I don’t think the version that we are using supports mobile devices. I think it is on the desktop only, although we can select laptops. I’d like to see a mobile version.

It’s pretty stable.

As I’ve mentioned with the customization, you can do that. So, in that way, it's scalable.

Actually, I believe I was using Oracle already, but that was on the database side. That was limited to my field only, and so that's the reason I moved.

I was not involved in actually setting up the product, but I am involved in some of the customization we do. Sometimes we have to do setup, but that is not initial setup. We make some modifications.

Setup was mostly straightforward; it was not that complicated. We had some user manuals and some recordings, which made it easier.

From the beginning, we were only using Oracle. It's not a small product, it's a big company. Going from Oracle to another vendor would be very costly. That's why they are not thinking about it. Maybe for the next 5 to 10 years, my company will be using only Oracle, but I'm not completely sure.

When I’m choosing a vendor such as Oracle, I look at all factors such as scalability, price and so on. Nowadays, there is a lot of freeware available in the marketplace. We look at performance but also at big data. For example, Hadoop is freeware, so price is definitely one of the factors.

The kind of features they have provided is very helpful. It's very user friendly.

Look at the features Oracle provides and also at the customization options. For some products, there are limitations; for example, you cannot customize it. We can directly do the customization in the Oracle application. It’s not like we are developing some third-party application, and from there importing the data. We can directly customize the main application; this way, it is easier. Nonetheless, there are some risks involved with that as well… :)

The most valuable feature is its ability to give us real-time information.

Of course, we'd like to see those reports re-introduced. Right now, we have more reports for the general ledger module. We would like more reports for the other modules: fixed assets, AP, revenue, and so on. That's where the problem is.

I have been using it since 1997, 19 years.

It has not been consistently stable. One time, when they did an upgrade to R12, it messed up some of our reports. That's why we went to GL Wand for some of our reporting solutions.

We’re still using this solution day-to-day. We're still sticking with it, of course. We just kind of make do with what we have right now.

Technical support has been fine. We haven't had any problems. Whenever we’ve had a hiccup or something, there's always been a representative to help us. They're knowledgeable and the response time is okay.

The initial upgrade, as I’ve mentioned, took away some of our valuable reports that were in the original Oracle EBS. That was really annoying.

The other thing was that, when we did the upgrade, it brought up some bad data from prior years. It took a few years to figure out what was going on. It still, even to this day, four years later, still pops up information from 10 or 11 years ago. Luckily, we're not a big, big company; we're just a local government.

Right now, we kind of solved our reporting issues in the general ledger part with GL Wand, or Excel4apps, but we're still trying to figure out the other modules through custom reporting. It’s taken time. I really wouldn’t have an answer for anybody.

I like to work with vendors who have a good reputation and good customer support.