Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

We've run our business on it for 15 years now. It's provided us good functionality, good flexibility, so if we need to extend it or modify it, it's fairly easy to do, and those changes are persistent.

It's been very useful over the years and Oracle's fairly responsive to requests for changes. It takes a while for them to get through, because it takes a lot to get those processes reviewed through Oracle. It's been a good partnership for us over the years.

I'd like to see more mobile applications, though I know they're working on that. It also needs simpler setups and simpler management tools. Currently the setup of mobile and some newer areas is not simple.

We've been using it since 1999.

Deployment is not simple, particular with mobile applications.

It has been a very stable product. We've pretty much taken all of the recommendations that Oracle provides. We do a multi-node implementation, so we've spread it out over multiple servers so that we don't have very many performance issues. Most of the performance issues we've had are related to IO, so that's a hardware issue and not software. Again, when we do have performance issues, it's always been working in SR with Oracle and they've been very responsive.

It's very easy to scale E-Business Suite as we need more servers. We can add them and take them away as needed. During year-end, we always need more horsepower, so we just add more servers and we can take them away afterwards.

They're always hiring new people, so if you get a new person, it's somewhat chancy on getting good support, but they generally have excellent people. Eventually you can get to somebody who's excellent, especially if your problem is a challenging one. It's easy to escalate it and get it up there.

I've always thought working with Oracle support has been much better than any other vendor we've worked with. They're always improving their website and making it more helpful. I've been very pleased with their support.

The reporting capabilities keep us from having to run every report for our users as they can go in and run the reports themselves. With BI Publisher, the templates are either already there or we can help them modify and customize the existing ones. Our users get data exactly the way they like it.

It's part of the back end of finance and they're able to do their month-end closures and other tasks with much greater ease.

I'd like to get BI integrated into the transactional system and not just the Data Mart. We've been having issues with making that happen. So, maybe making that a little easier to implement would be an area of improvement. The project summarization also needs some work, though we've heard that it's fixed in version 12.2.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

We've not had serious downtime, but we've had some issue. We run projects and we've done the project summarizations, but we've got SRs open with Oracle to work on that.

It has scaled for us, though I think we're reaching our limit on it. That's why we're going to Exadata, so I hope that that will help with the scalability.

For the most part, if it's a serious issue we can escalate to level-two support and get good responses.

I've been through two of the upgrades. We went live the year before I joined the company, but then I was involved with the 11i upgrade and the R12 upgrade. They were pretty complex. We had both functional and technical assistance for both of those upgrades. It was a lot of work and a lot of long hours. But, getting on the R12 helped with some issues we were having with the 11i.

You definitely need a good IT staff with the ability to cross-train. That's really what's helped us since R12 -- bringing on some of the folks we had during the upgrade and them being able to cross-train those teams.

I like the fact that it encompasses our whole business: everywhere from our manufacturing to our supply chain, our order cache, our whole financials -- just everything.

I like how it's standardized across our organization. We don't have one user with a different experience with a different system. It's got the same look and feel all over. You learn to use Oracle in one area, you can easily learn if you change positions. That's one nice thing off the top of my head.

I think it would be nice to see some streamlining of the process. There's a lot of screens to go through, a lot of levels to get down to. I see that in purchasing, I see it in accounts payable, and even AR to a degree. Sales orders is another one. When entering transactions, there are multiple tabs and multiple levels, so you can kind of get lost, especially for our new users. It's not so intuitive.

I've been working with Oracle for almost 20 years now.

Ours is pretty stable, and it pretty much has been from day one.

We haven't really grown all that much as far as users or transactions that go through. It's been pretty steady, so we haven't needed it to grow by leaps and bounds. As years go on, we're getting more and more transactions in there. When you go and search something, it's been able to keep up with all of that.

There have been years where it's not so good. Honestly, in these last 5-6 years, it's been pretty solid. I've always been able to open a ticket, and if I can't find the answer myself in my Oracle support, then the ticket gets resolved fairly quickly and to a resolution, so that's nice.

I think one of the things is having Oracle in your organization requires a deep check book. It's a lot of money, and it continues to be a lot of money over the years. It's a big long-term investment.

It takes a lot of staff to run it. Not only do you have your Oracle staff that supports it, depending on your organization that can be anywhere from 2 to 10 people, it also includes your departments as well. Your AR, your accounts payable, and all of your finance and cost management and all of those people are required. It takes a good staff to make it work.

The most valuable feature is the data availability across the enterprise from sales to manufacturing to distribution. There's also the dashboard plus it just eliminates the silos within the company. We used to have sales that operated without giving consideration to what their decisions meant to manufacturing, what an event did to the visibility and interaction. But now, all departments are able to see the effects of their decisions on other departments.

It's increased the speed with which we can get things done. Having that visibility of data between functional areas lets us react quicker, and lets us satisfy our customer needs quicker.

I'd like to see more mobile functionality, as well as a lot more manufacturing shop floor control. I don't want to have to record information that a machine is already recording.

We're mostly happy with it. The stability issues that we have are based more on operating systems, I think, than ERP systems. Our Microsoft SQL servers have to be rebooted and the ERP system is not available, but it's not the fault of the ERP system as much as it is a Microsoft product issue.

We've had good success with scalability. We haven't had much issue with it.

We partner with a consulting firm, so all of our help desk tickets go through them. We don't deal with Oracle directly.

It took about a year and was a painful process. I would never want to do it again, but we went from a system we used for 30 years to something much more dynamic and new.

We partnered with a consulting firm, and we came in on time and under budget. Can't ask for much better than that.

An Oracle solution wasn't our first as we selected a different solution. We failed in that implementation, and Oracle was our number two choice. We purchased the first choice and we failed, so after that we regrouped, we re-evaluated again. Oracle was again in the top three so we gave them a try.

What I learned is that we needed to get that solution in to run our business and then be open to the fact that neither we nor our implementation partner knew our business, so we ended up with a vanilla installation that would run our business. Then knowing that we had work in the future to do, we as a company learned Oracle and how to utilize it to fit our business.

Don't expect to put in a hundred-percent functional, whiz-bang ERP system the first time, but know that you would have a vanilla solution that you have to grow and help mature over a course of years.

This is an enormous product and it's our ERP system. It pretty much performs all of our accounting transactions and is the single source of truth for all our financial statements. That's the most valuable feature of E-Business Suite.

It's where everyone in our organization goes to see any and all information and data dealing with our accounting and finances.

They need to make the interface a little more slick. It's form-based, so loading of the forms is pretty annoying. I would make the user interface friendlier and more workable.

We've been using Oracle probably since 1990, or even before. We've been using R12 since 2010.

We had no issues with deployment.

It's been relatively stable. There have been bugs and subsequent patches. If we don't test properly, we'll come across a few issues.

It's very scalable. You can customize it as much as you want, but too much customization results in some issues, we've found.

We have pretty good support though Oracle Managed Cloud Services.

The initial setup is very complex. I wasn't there for the initial implementation, but just knowing what I know, it's very complex to get it set up. You need an implementation team or consulting firm to come in and help.

I'm sure we used a third-party implementation team or consulting firm.

I would probably say that the biggest benefit for the company is just having all of the information under one umbrella, in one central location. It's also very useful having the ability to create connections between the different departments within our organization.

To me, it seems overly complicated and the interactions between the modules are unclear to me. Oracle needs to provide training sessions that teach about the interactions, and we need someone in our company who also knows how the pieces fit together. This would go a long way towards helping us fit E-Business Suite to our business. Right now, it's like trying to fit a round peg into a square hole and I feel like we're not using it the way it's supposed to be used. We have to bend the rules or try to force it to do what we want. And it's been difficult.

We use Install Base, Service Contracts, Order Management, and Deeper Repair, and a few other modules. There's just so many that if someone who understood both our business and our tool, then this person could configure E-Business Suits to meet our business needs. Currently, each department needs something different and there are so many changes for each to the solution, that the changes aren't cohesive and, in fact, create problems for each other.

I'd prefer for everything to be web-based and not as a Java program. When I compare it to familiar tools, such as Salesforce and other CRMs, E-Business Suits seems really outdated and difficult to use and navigate.

Deploying it optimally across our various departments has been troublesome.

In my experience, it's been stable, but I think our IT department would say the opposite.

It's scaled, as far as I know. But, again, our IT might not agree.

I don't personally like it all that much, but I know that it does a lot of stuff that's important.

My advice would be to find somebody who knows everything that the tool does and somebody who knows your business. Make sure that you're building it at the beginning to fit your business.

The best feature is that EBS provides a look and feel that's easy for our functional users. We use it for our financials, and the intuitiveness of the solution is very good.

We've seen a lot more cohesiveness in our organization since we started using EBS. Our work blends together well with is and it's not so fragmented anymore. There's definitely been an increase in the efficiency of our man-hours, as well as a reduction in the amount of time we need to manage the financials.

The product is pretty good, but it incorporates both old forms and new HTML/Java-based pages. I'd really like to see Oracle move away from the old forms entirely and go with the new. Currently, there are certain things, like entering a purchase order, that you can do in either the new or old way, and they each work in completely differently. And, sometimes there are bugs in one that's not present in the other. I'd like to see an across-the-board transition to the new pages.

We were early adopters and have been using it for over 10 years. It's constantly evolving, which is nice.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

It's pretty stable as we keep up with the latest and greatest versions. My boss is really big on patching and upgrading.

It is pretty scalable. Right now, we're doing iExpense and iAsset, so we're always building upon it.

The level of technical support depends on who you get. Sometimes they'll lag along and we have to keep prodding them and babysit the ticket. Sometimes I'll have to get my boss on the thine to scream at them. Other times, they're really responsive. So it varies.

The complexity of the setup depends on what we're doing. When we upgraded to R12, the setup was painful. It depends also on consultants, functional leads, and others involved. So the setup is not just about the product itself. Also, because we were early adopters, we experienced a lot of bugs that hadn't yet been worked out, and some of the consulting at that time wasn't the greatest.

We implemented it with a combination of our in-house team and outside consultants.

My main piece of advice is to make sure you have all your testing scripts. Make sure your functional users test before implementation.

At Dekalb County, the most valuable feature of E-Business Suite is the integration of all the different modules. It's truly become our financial database from a projects and procurement point of view. It's all connected and logical.

Oracle has clearly brought experts to the table for the their design and development roles. In the early days, E-Business Suit was comprise simply of programmers' coding, but that's not their model anymore. I like that Oracle's brought in experts who know payables, who know what CFO's want to see, etc. They've got real-world experience and it shows because when you stand it up for the first time, it's an absolutely useable system. From that perspective, it's 100% worth the investment.

For example, sub-ledger accounting was new to release 12. If I am an international company or I want to deal with a company outside of the United States, they record things a little bit differently in their accounting. If I want to value my company and I have inventory in the United States, we put that on our books. I could have $100 worth of inventory, so therefore my company looks like it's $100 better than maybe Italy, but Italy doesn't record inventory on their books. It's not an asset.

So with E-Business Suite, Oracle has built a product from which I can make entity/business decision adaptations without changing the underlying code.

What sub-ledger accounting allows me to do is recreate the accounting structure, so I could still have my primary books, which is in US GAAP, but I could have secondary books. Now that I'm working in county government, where E-Business Suite really helps is with cash management.

I am fine with where E-Business Suite is now. From a county standpoint, I would like to see them integrate fund accounting into fixed assets and cash management. Right now, E-Business Suit really isn't 100% public sector. I guess we're not the market to roll out to.

Also, I'm not impressed with the out-of-the-box analytics. It's really the bare minimum.

Moreover, out-of-the-box, Oracle E-Business Suite's cash management module does not do fund accounting. It puts a strain on our accounting staff because the data doesn't really represent properly, but I was able to get it to work by using sub-ledger accounting to redefine the delivered Oracle out-of-the-box method.

I've been using E-Business Suite since 1989.

We've had no issues deploying it.

Whether we have stability issues depends on how long a module has been out. With the evolution of E-Business Suite, each new module has had its hiccups and challenges. The longer the module is out, however, the more stable it becomes. This has been our experience with GL, accounts payable, accounts receivable, fixed assets, cash management, and fund accounting.

The frustrating part of that is because it's new, you don't have the expertise out there to pull on. You could call Oracle support and yes, they're going to help you eventually, but one of the things that the user group gives me is, I know people who know GL, accounts payable, etc. I can reach out to my network, but I don't have a network on new products.

So the answer to the stability question is both yes and no.

E-Business Suite is scalable. We don't have to worry about it at my organization, but I know from my prior consulting experience that it's absolutely scalable, from mom-and-pop shops to large multi-national companies.

I have up and down days with Oracle support. Like anything, it depends on who your support analyst is. They have some phenomenal analysts. Unfortunately, the lifespan, as I understand it, is only maybe 18 months. They come to know this product inside and out, but then they go on to do other things. If I look at it realistically, here we only call support when there's an issue. We're always complaining. If I was on the receiving end of that, 18 months of listening to complaints might get old. There are the people who can answer my questions and who will get it done, and then there are those who don't.

Actually, I'm dealing with a support ticket now. I have had to on multiple occasions put in the ticket 'read my question' versus what I think is happening. I don't know if it's a computer that spits out the first few e-mails, but it's "hello, my name is X, Y, Z", and as a business, you get sick of the same old stuff. I need this resolved and, honestly, the time it takes for me to log into Oracle support and read the stock e-mails has become extremely frustrating.

The setup to me is straightforward, but I've been using it for so long. For a new person, I don't think that companies could use the software without consulting help of some sort. You need to understand your business. There are very good consultants who could come in and they will ask you the right questions to help drive the setup. They're decisions that need to be made that, if wrong, you can still live with. But, there are other, more critical decisions that you make that you can't undo. So is it easy to set up? Physically going into the screens is as simple as can be. The question really needs to be, how much time do you need to put in prior to sitting down to set the system up? You really need to understand your business and you need to understand what you're trying to do.

We had outside help, but what causes problems is the fact that when you're a company and you're looking for new software, you are sitting there and you're saying, "OK my old software doesn't quite do what I want," so you want to buy something else. You go out, you do your RFP, you decide you're going to get E-Business Suite. The problem is, the experts at the company know their business. They also know their business using their old system. The consultants that they get to come in, they know E-Business Suite, but they don't know your business. The two don't always mesh correctly. What I've noticed over the years is you end up re-implementing the old system you just came off of. You're not utilizing all of the neat features that E-Business Suite has.

If you haven't implemented it and are considering purchasing it, don't be afraid of it. Go ahead, jump in. Oracle is a phenomenal company and they will stand behind their product. The best advice is to take your time, know your business, and don't always take 100% judgement from your consultant. Use their advice, but listen to that little voice in your head of what you know as well. Have a good collaboration between you and the consultant. Don't try to do it on your own.

The last piece of advice and what many companies fail to do is the education portion. I can't tell you how many companies I've gone into to do training only after they've gone live. And it never fails that they've scaled back their education to save money. Like where I am now at Dekalb County, they never train the end users. These end users know absolute basics to get by, but they don't know all the great tools. Even though once it's implemented, they need to keep learning it. Just because you've implemented a product, you're not done. Now, after it has settled down and you've used it, you can go and see what else your product that's live can also do. So remember to get educated.