Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

Management of supply chain in the petroleum industry: from requesting quotes from suppliers to issuing LPO, managing credit; and selling in cash, credit, and discounts.

Generating reports is more efficient: generating financial reports, employee reports, volume reports, and time attendance reports.

Accessing vital information on the dashboard: I can customize summarized reports to be available on the dashboard.

Sending alerts through bulk SMS. With the growing use of mobile phones, we would appreciate sending notifications through SMS.

The most valuable features for us are the abilities it provides for us to generate our financial statements and to develop our own customized reports exactly how we want. We've found it to be very, very good for a government entity or public-sector company. We do things a little differently from most private sector companies, and most EBS solutions, except for the Oracle product, are really focused more on private industry than public. So we really need that customization capability, and it's able to be customized for a functional-level user, which is ideal for our group.

I'd like to see the reporting improved. Right now, we do not own any of the hub or any of modules for financial reporting. We use this archaic thing called Discover. Discover is fine for a tech-finance person to handle, but a functional user doesn't understand it. It's not really used very well. The reports are not very pretty because we have to do a lot of extra formatting and publishing in order to do our annual reports. We actually have an additional outside system to do our annual reports. That's how bad it is.

We were early adopters. In 1998 is when they went to 11i and then they upgraded in 2012 to 12.1.3.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It has been consistently stable because when we implemented it, we basically kept it vanilla. We have no customizations, and it's fully supported by a hosted Oracle group. We didn't have to do much in that instance, because we kept it vanilla.

We're the city, so there's not much growth, it's more like volume of transactions. We are one of the largest cities, or the largest city, in Virginia, so we have a lot of transactional information that we have to do on a regular basis, and being able to track that in our unique, public-sector way is very important. They have been able to sustain us for this long, and we've been fairly content with it, but we have not taken any advantage of all the automation that could be used in that product.

One of the things is the timing is very, very slow for turnaround of most things. We get handed off to different people. We do not keep the same person who started researching the problem usually following up with us. We usually feel like we have to start over every time we get somebody new to figure out what's going on. If we had somebody from start to finish, we think we probably would have gotten resolution quicker and been able to keep that knowledge base of what's happened in the past. A group, or a smaller group of people, would have been more ideal.

The initial setup was simple and straightforward because we kept it vanilla with out-of-the-box functionalities.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

The most valuable feature from our experience with E-Business Suite is definitely its ease of use. You do have to train people to use it, but a lot of it is just common sense. It's very user friendly and you're able to navigate around and figure out where you need to go to get what you want.

E-Business Suite has really improved our efficiency of going about everyday business -- so long as our users are using it correctly. A lot of that has to do with just our business processes, but the tool sets up to be very efficient.

The biggest area of improvement would be around user access and sign-in. Currently, there's no notification for changing passwords that are about to expire. Passwords simply expire without any warning.

We've had no issues deploying it.

The stability is generally good. The only real issue we've had is with runaway concurrent requests, which brings things to a crawl.

It's scaled well for us. We use it globally in 22 different countries and it's up 24/7.

Technical support is good, though it depends on which module you're asking about. Sometimes we have to escalate service requests so that they get to the relevant techs, but the service is good overall.

It was already implemented, and then I came on.

It's all about the data. If you don't have good data, it's not going to work correctly. It's really on the business side. They have to provide the correct data, the correct rules, and it'll work. It'll do what it's supposed to do, as long as the business provides what they need to provide.

Process costing.

Improved visibility into manufacturing.

Costing: very good, in-depth analysis.

Reporting.

Financial, procure to pay, order to cash, inventory management, enterprise asset management, human resources management, and iStore.

We have saved millions of dollars in inventory. Before this system, we did not have integration and every shop was ordering inventory individually, without checking with the other shops.

With eAM (Enterprise Asset Management) we have seen improvements in preventive maintenance, asset tracking, planning, cost analysis for maintenance, and integration of procurement.

Inventory and enterprise asset maintenance.

The iStore could be better.

I give it an eight out of 10 because it required some customization.

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.

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.

Being able to get all the financial data into one system that talks to each other and get our financials published every month.

We've been on it for so long that it's hard to think.

The mobile apps, I think, are the up and coming thing for us. To make it easier for people to do things on the go. I know that they do have a bunch of them but, in a lot of cases, you can only view information on a lot of the mobile apps. Like you can't action on any of them. I think with procurement you can't create requisitions on the mobile app. You can just see the status of them.

Oracle Alerts is kind of a forgotten application and it's great for just sending users notifications about the status of things. It's much easier than learning WorkFlow so we still use it a lot. It used to be that when email was character based you'd send out the email and everything looked great. Now when you send out an email and you try to put stuff in columns it's just clear text so the columns don't line up. They've never added the feature to be able to send the email in HTML format. That would be nice to just, I mean, it's not a big thing and it hasn't changed a lot but it would make life a little simpler.

We've been a customer for over 20 years.

We've had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Pretty good. We're pretty satisfied. If we raise something to a P1 they work on it 24/7. We don't have any issues with that. We don't raise a lot of problems because there aren't that many problems anymore. We keep our customizations down to a minimum.

I wasn't involved in the initial set up. I was involved in all the upgrades thereafter. They vary, some were great some were pretty straightforward others were problems all the way along. Their migration paths, they've gotten better over the years so they're not quite as bad.

I would say look at your processes and your internal procedures and see if you can modify those as opposed to trying to customize the application to fit what you currently do.