Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

The most valuable feature for us is that it gives us the ability to process the requisitions from our end users quickly, which is tied into all of our financials. It's given us a quick, easy, seamless process to do that.

E-Business Suite ties together many modules -- financials, procurement, HR, and many others. So that's the biggest benefit for us: it's just one platform. We don't have to deal with a lot of different external modules. They're all tied together neatly.

I wish that it was more public-sector friendly. It just seems like with the encumbrances, they slow down the process a little bit, and most public sector entities like us use encumbrance accounting.

In the private sector, invoices are paid when goods or services are received. However, in the public sector with encumbrance accounting, funds are reserved against the budget so that there are no overages. Once funds are committed, we've agreed to purchase goods or services without having already received them. Without encumbrance accounting, we wouldn't know whether a good or service has been received until after the invoice is paid and entered into the system.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

It's not 100% stable. As I'm a functional user, I notify IT to fix issues. Whether they do it or ask Oracle to do it, I'm not sure.

We haven't had any issues with scalability. For us, it seems to run at the same speed with the same functionality whether we have one user or a thousand.

I wish they would improve on it. For a functional user like me, technical support has been tough. With SR's, I've had to go back and forth. It seems like this is one area that hasn't improved in the ten years I've used Oracle. They have analyzers, but sometimes we just need help from Oracle support.

I was involved in the initial setup and had help along the way. The setups were easy for me, but I know that the technical portions of the install with our IT guys had some glitches.

We had third-party help in some regards, but then our DBA and our system admin knew most of the areas that we needed to for setup to convert from 11i to 12.1.

It's complex. In my opinion, it's similar to Apple products. It's complex in nature, and once you're on it you need to stay on it. Don't be afraid of the look and feel of it, because I've been on other products and although some of the other products look and feel a little bit better at the beginning, they are all buggy. They all have their issues, and I like Oracle products.

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.

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.