Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

For us, its value lies in the fact that it's an ERP solution our enterprise to manage the business well. Specifically, we have the core Financial Management module on our project which helps the business user analyze data. They have access to different types of analytics, such as general ledger, payables, receivables, and many others.

It has everything in one place. We can just access one piece of software for payables, GL, PO, projects, and everything just integrates together. It's helped us to reduce data entry because we can just enter data once and it's accessible from the other modules. It certainly reduces human intervention, which in turn saves time and, ultimately, money.

We seem to be constantly applying patches and updates to fix bugs. Oracle should really improve upon this issue, especially since it happens to frequently.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It's been stable, but we've got to constantly patch. I guess this is something we always have to do with Windows-based applications.

It's been scaling just fine for us.

The initial setup was very complex. Installing it is not bad, but it's configuring it that's difficult. It's getting the setup correct, and that's what takes time. It's company-specific, but we're pretty vanilla. Even with that, it still takes many months to upgrade. The documentation is there, but it might be helpful to have someone who's done this one or two times before.

Probably one of the most valuable features that we've seen has been around the E-Business Suite change, as far as the UI is concerned. As far as the E-Business Suite 12 2.5, the look and feel has drastically changed from 11i to 12.1, to 12.2. The UI from an end user's perspective, being able to configure the UI, such that they have buttons; using it on an iPad or an iPhone, mobile application integration, all these different technologies coming together. It is kind of one of those things where the E-Business Suite's starting to get that new look and feel that has been lagging for a couple of years.

The benefits are around ease of use, trying to make those end users lives easier, to be able to make transactions, point-and-click transactions, having the ability for drop-down lists to be much easier. As far as the UI is concerned, over the years, you'd have to go through multiple tabs to put a transaction in. Now, you can go to one screen and have the options right in front of you. Pick the options you want, press save, and away you go. Oracle's trying to improve the ease of use for the end users.

As far as additional features of the E-Business Suite, I would like to see more of the framework applications in use. Oracle is slowly transitioning there. We do realize that the older form's version of the technology has a lot of intelligence built in them; very difficult for Oracle to make that migration to the new technology. Ideally, it's getting to one platform. Perhaps, the removal of Java from that integration right now. Java continues to be an issue for organizations that are running multiple products. If they have multiple products that they're using, E-Business Suite, maybe third-party products. You've got different versions of Java that are required for each. That becomes a problem. It's an ongoing issue. We do know and we've heard Oracle's heading towards some type of new solution, if you will. Certainly, trying to focus on becoming a fully frameworked product, versus the old form's technology.

As far as stability of the E-Business Suite 12.2.5, the product was released in October 2015. It's been out for several months. There are, obviously, from a patching perspective ... I'd say Oracle's improving the release. With any release of a product, there's always going to be a need for patches and things like that. Being that the product's fairly new, there's a low number of users that are actually making that transition to 12.2.5. With that, the repository of issues within Oracle support is slowly building. One user may have an issue where another has not, that issue by that one client may have the solution available to them now in the support repository.

The solution's very scalable. Oracle, E-Business Suite, the various releases, 12.2.5, 12.1, 11.5, they're being used by organizations, small and large. From very small organizations, to multi-billion dollar organizations, they're very scalable solutions.

Oracle's technical support has drastically improved over the years. The support.oracle.com, or My Oracle Support, is a very good tool. We do encourage our team members, as well as our end users, to look there first. Literally, sometimes it's trying to find a needle in a haystack. Certainly, the information's typically there, based on the search ability what you're searching for is putting specific criteria to find that. Sometimes, people are so broad that they get many, many hits. The ideal situation is putting in something very specific, that you may be able to find what you're looking for, and not having to scroll through pages and pages of results, if you will.

I think investing into, or even investigating into the products, typically, some organizations might buy the E-Business Suite, they own more product than they realize. If they buy 100% of the product, they're only using maybe 20% of the functionality. It's taking advantage of that other 80% and implementing those features and functionality into their business, that's a return on investment that some organizations don't take, for various reasons. They don't know they have a product, and perhaps they start investigating their maintenance agreement, and they find that they own something, and now they want to implement that.

Looking at some organizations, they have some folks that are dedicated to looking at new technology, it's constantly looking out to see what can be applied to the business. Some organizations don't do that; they don't have the time or resources to do that. Organizations that do, you look at them, they're fairly progressive. It's trying to, at least, maybe identify someone that can help, I'll say, support the investment that they've made into the organization. You have companies that are investing millions and millions of dollars into these products, and really only taking advantage of a very small footprint of their total ownership of the product.

The E-Business Suite, there is certainly, if you're operating or implementing, from a set-up standpoint, usually from an upgrade standpoint, the set-ups are minimal. You're always going to have some type of set-up in the application. If you're doing a fresh implementation, the setup material's available for you, step-by-step set-up documentation by Oracle. It doesn't mean that you'll get a perfect solution by the end of the day, but it'll lead you down that path of being successful.

When looking at new solutions, considering that Oracle E-Business Suite is the core, and looking at other products that may integrate; key is going to be integration. Someone that's certified, has a certified integration with the Oracle E-Business Suite, you don't want to be looking at third-party solutions that don't have the integration, those that are part of that program are basically required to keep their products at the certification level of each release of the product. That 12.2.5, they must be integrated with that. At 12.2, 12.1, 11.5.10, they've got to have their products integrated at that release. Very critical, when looking at third-party products, to integrate with Oracle E-Business Suite.

Rating: looking at the E-Business Suite right now, having worked with the product since 1991 and looking to see where they're at today, I'd say maybe a 7. They're heading towards that fully integrated product, that new technology, like the framework technology. If they get there, I'd give them a 10. Right now, probably a 7, because we have multiple technologies we're still dealing with.

Recommendation to peers: Looking at their business requirements for selecting the product, ensuring that every time you're looking at purchasing a product, derive that selection from defined business requirements. We get some organizations that just go out and buy things, then you go back, and they figure out that they bought a product that doesn't fit the solution they're trying to solve. Really, evaluating internally, getting clearly documented business requirements, mapping those through product selection, and literally having the organization sign off on that, so you're not investing all this money into a product that may not be used, because it's not fulfilling a solution.

The benefits of APEX and EBS is that APEX actually lives outside of EBS. When you develop customizations you don't have to embed them inside EBS. Now when you upgrade EBS or apply patches to it generally everything gets overwritten. If your customizations are inside EBS they get overwritten. In order to upgrade EBS you have to take those customizations out, park them on the side, do your upgrade and then take those customizations and reapply them to the product. Which is risky, time consuming, very expensive. If they're outside an EBS, in APEX that means if you upgrade everything the only thing you have to touch are the pieces of the API that may have changed in the upgrade. You don't have to do as much work to get that upgrade done.

Another aspect of it is that APEX is fundamentally PL/SQL solution with a lot of SQL. It lives inside the database. Therefore your existing EBS team who are already experts in SQL and PL/SQL can get up to speed very, very quickly with Apex. Apex is a declarative environment therefore it's a very rapid application development environment so you can do stuff really quickly.

There's a new version of APEX coming out to very, very soon, APEX 5.1 and that contains probably the last pieces of my wish list. Which would be very intuitive and easy to use, declarative set of tabular forms where's it's like a spreadsheet. You can see a lot of rows and update them simultaneously. That is a big step forward. Typically when we do conversions from Oracle forms applications, oracle forms is quite good with that multi row update and that in the past has been a weakness with APEX. This new version will completely wipe that problem out.

The scalability is really good because since APEX is inside the Oracle Database and it's just PL/SQL code with the SQL statements, it scales with the database. Which means it is completely scalable. For example shop.oracle.com which is the Oracle site for buying Oracle stuff is an APEX application. That's up 24/7, it's hit around the world, multi-lingual, you can buy the products in Farsi in German and all those languages.

Well APEX is a kind of a funny product in the Oracle space. Number one it's a no cost feature of the database. It doesn't get a lot of attention from the Oracle sales people. That's a fair comment, there's no commission for it. Therefore it's kind of like a hidden thing inside the database and a lot of people at organizations that have Oracle and very good Oracle people actually don't know it exists. That's part of what we do is we try to raise the awareness of APEX in the Oracle space. One of the big features of Oracle is if you want to do some customization and make a web application on top of an Oracle database it needs to be considered because it is a world class tool right now. Scales beautifully, it's got in their mid-tier the ORDS product, the Oracle Rest Data Services, mid-tier portion which is very light and small that has restful services which opens up the entire world to an APEX application. It can touch any database that has rest services exposed and it can go on to the cloud and if you want your list of Amazon books or go to Netflix, all of that stuff is easily available through that ORDS technology.

Training for APEX goes through several steps like anything else. You start as a beginner, go through intermediate and become senior. It's very easy to take that first step and become a very good confident beginner because it is a declarative environment all you need to do to get started with APEX is a little bit of SQL knowledge and not even PL/SQL when you start because it's all declarative. Oracle gives you some very good starting documentation. There are some good books now by the A press publisher, beginning Oracle Application Express. There's a couple of very good introduction books. If you work through those you'll be able to be very productive APEX developer.

APEX by itself is easy to learn and it's extremely powerful because it sits right sort of in the mid-tier between the Oracle backend and the JavaScript front end. The backend you since it's got a very easy interface into PL/SQL you've got all the rich environment like SQL analytics, very powerful Oracle engine underneath you and you can reach all of that stuff very, very easily from APEX. On the front end the tool gives you a lovely set of themes and templates for putting out your HTML and cascading style sheets and your JavaScript for the front end stuff. You can use APEX out of the box and get a very good user interface but if you want to customize it or brand it's nothing more than HTML, CSS and JavaScript which is all under your control.

If you're doing customization on top of an Oracle database you've got lots of competing technologies. For example ADF which is an Oracle product that Java based technology. You can use .NET. There is all sorts of other web technologies that can be used. You can even put things like Excel and Microsoft Access, those have jet engines in them that will talk to an Oracle database. All of these things can do what APEX does. A lot of that is driven by like, if you're an organization and say you've got a bunch of .NET programmers. Well if you've got .NET programmers use .NET.

Years ago I was in a small shop and we were using Visual Basic 6. Visual Basic 6 at the time was going to be deprecated by Microsoft. With this team I was looking down the road and I was looking at using Java and I was looking at using .Net going forward. Since those are heavy in the mid-tier, I was seeing maybe tiers at 2:00 in the morning for this team especially the team when they saw curly braces the Java they got with catatonic. I was really nervous because these folks were coming from like a Fox pro background and a VB park. They were just really uncomfortable with the Java stuff, .NET stuff. Then I found application express and I went back to my team, showed it to them, we got to the apex.oracle.com workspaces up which is a free cloud based solution that allows you to kick the tires. We kicked the tires and realized we were saved. We went down that road because it was very easy for my team to come up to speed very quickly with that product and we did that.

Rating: with the current version I would say eight because like any other tool it's got its strengths and there are a few weaknesses, but I consider it a very high quality product. I've been with APEX now for over ten years. I built the farm on APEX and I've been very successful with it and many of my clients have been very successful using the product.

Basically if somebody comes to me like a young millennial says, "Okay, should I learn APEX?" The short answer for me is, "Yes." The company I am with, Insum, we've been doubling over the last few years because there's a huge amount of uptake of APEX right now. We have some very large clients here in the States some of the major banks use APEX for their production systems. We're into other large industries that have really found it very very useful and we jumped into it with both feet. We have no direct competitors because the people that theoretically are our direct competitors are basically our joint venture partners. There's so much work out there that we don't step on each other and it's growing every day.

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.

We had an issue in which access should be made by the tax team and not necessarily the team entering the transaction. Oracle, however, has now made taxes a separate module for E-Business Suite, and with it, the tax team knows exactly what they have access to and what issues they need to fix. The tax module allows us to set up rules for the tax team to better do their job.

We've proposed many changes to Oracle. For example, we'd like to be able to customize a single specific piece of E-Business Suite without having to customize the entire structure. I'd also like an auto-review function so that we're able to see certain information without accessing it only if the management team asks us to.

We've been using it since 2004.

We've had no issues with deployment.

The stability is really 50/50 right now. It could be issues with certain pages or data, or it could be a training issue on our end.

It's scaleable. Oracle provides pretty good data plans for E-Business Suite so that you can customize using Java if you want.

The level of technical support depend on which analyst I'm getting through to. Sometimes they're pretty good, and other times they just throw their hands in the air.

The initial setup is pretty good now. Every page has help associated with it.

I love SLA because it gives me flexibility. Not me, my team. I don't deal with it anymore. SLA gives me flexibility to do things that I need without involving development, not that I mind, but it's better to do it yourself. For example, adding descriptions that I need for for my Latin American business. It's a great thing. It's like a couple of clicks you have it without any development involvement. I love that. So SLA is good, AME (Approval Management Engine) is also very good. It's excellent.

If you upgrade to 12.2.5 you won't have iProcurement problems. But if you upgrade to 12.2.4, you're going to get those in abundance. It's going to keep you employed till the rest of your life. So you upgrade to 12.2.5 to get rid of those. However, if you upgrade to 12.2.5 you will get localization support at zero level because it hasn't been added yet to the release.

So go figure, what I going to do when I have the whole world of Oracle in Latin America and I can't take 12.2.5? We opted for a broken iProcure that we're going to fix ourselves.

We've been using Oracle EBS since 1998.

Well, let's think about it. This product could be stable if it's a good support team supporting it. If there is a teams of experts supporting it, yeah, it is stable. But sometimes it becomes unstable and then a good support team jumps into it and makes it stable again.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

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.

The integration of all the various modules is definitely the most valuable feature for us. We're a business outfit, so we have customers, we pay bills, and we look to Oracle primarily for products that can integrate into our existing system. If it doesn't, we look at something else, but we always start with Oracle first.

We use the billing module heavily. In fact, one of the things I was looking for were some of the new features in 12.2.4, which which include federal billing features. That's really going to be helpful for us and that's what we're upgrading to right now because we've had to have customizations before. We're hoping that the inherent functionality that we'll be upgrading to will allow us to drop some of our customizations. We try to keep our Oracle as vanilla as possible, so having those enhanced features is something that we're really looking forward to.

For simplicity's sake, we like to cut down on the number of interfaces that we need. It makes upgrading easier because of the integration and it helps me to oversee things from a functional perspective. We are doing an upgrade right now, but it also makes it easier to plan for your upgrades and to follow through on those plans.

We have project contracts for government customers, and that has been a little bit tougher to implement, because I don't think Oracle has a lot of clients on that. We implemented that about two or three years ago, but we haven't found a lot of people who are using it. What I'd like to see is not necessarily something in the functionality of the software, but rather a way to meet some of the other customers who are using the product, which would be helpful.

Also, we would like to do more with iExpense. We use iExpense right now for purchasing cards, but we do not use it for employee vouchers. I think we cannot use it two ways at the same time. We're using it right now for the purchasing cards, but we don't use it for employee vouchers. I think we would like to have more functionality in that area.

We've had it for twenty years, so it predates my tenure there. We're really simple; we are one legal entity, one operating unit, one ledger. We are embarking right now on implementing Multi-Currency as we do have some international business. We probably are going to do more with multi-org in the future, but we haven't started that yet. It's called Multi-Org, but it's not a module, it's just functionality. For example, we right now have one legal entity in the US. We just opened our office in Singapore, so if we have a need to establish a separate set of books for them, then that would be Multi-Org and we'd set up a new set of books for Singapore. But right now have everything in one US ledger.

I've been there six years and the only big thing we've really implemented is Project Contracts. Actually, we did hire an outside consultant, because that product is quite specialized. I don't recall there being any big issues with deploying that.

It's very stable. There's a little bit of bugginess in the billing area, but generally, because we've had it for so long, we've worked out a lot of our issues.

I think we still have enterprise licensing, for the most part, so it's easy to scale.

For one thing, we do a lot of work with the federal government, but the federal government isn't the federal government. It depends on which piece of the federal government you work with. Each of your customers in the government have different requirements and you really do have to do some customizations around billing. Because we have all these different federal government customers, some of them want the bills uploaded into a certain system that they have to process their bills, or they want the bills to be in a certain format and your other government customers don't need it in that format. We do a lot of things based on the customers’ needs, but I think the functionality in this next release is taking some of those considerations and putting them in the software, so they're there already. So the 10-34's and 10-35's that the government requires, their putting that into the Oracle functionality, whereas before we had to make those on our own.

It takes us a while, but we do things very methodically. We have not typically had outside consultants and we typically do our own upgrades. I think that that's a good thing.

I would advise potential user that, if they're implementing from scratch, to really, really learn the product before they implement. Oracle is known for certain decisions you make where you come to a point to either turn right or left, and if you turn right you can't decide later to turn left. I think some people try to slam things in and take short cuts, but I've done implementations in two different companies, and I've found that doing the slow and methodical approach and really planning it out is the best way to go.