Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

Our primary use case is for order management, bills of materials, work in progress, and finance. I take care of the infrastructure in the Oracle apps. We're a customer of Oracle and I'm a system analyst.

Oracle has always been known for its finance modules and that is definitely a valuable feature. From the back-end, Oracle has been the leader forever. Also from a functional perspective, it provides us with great customization which I'm not sure is available in most of the other ERPs. In that sense it provides a great level of flexibility.

Oracle has always had one drawback and that is that it's not as user friendly as it's competitors, whether from the database perspective or switching from SAP to Oracle. The amount of administrative effort required for SAP is far less than that required for Oracle where the administration part is very tight and can be a bit of a headache. With SAP, the number of patches, bug fixes or interim upgrades are far less than Oracle which releases a lot of patches for bugs. As a head-on comparison, you get the feeling that SAP is a far more stable product. The bottom line is that the administration of the database and the application could be improved. 

There are many additional features I'd like to see. From an automation perspective, things could be improved. If you compare it with many of the competitors' products, the markets associated patent technology is highly competitive. Most other solutions are very user friendly and have such rich experience in the user interface that I think a holistic approach towards making Oracle more user friendly and usable is something I'd like to see.

I've been using this solution for about 10 years. 

It's a stable solution but Oracle releases security patches every quarter, so you need to apply them and then there are additional bug fixes with respect to the business center. The solution doesn't crash and there's no unpredictability in behavior. There's no performance issue. It's very robust when it comes to overall setup. 

Scalability has improved recently because of the many interfaces that Oracle has and many other products that it can integrate with. Even in Identity Access Manager, it has its own products. So in that sense, it's improved a lot on its scalability.

The support is good. Oracle has a global presence when it comes to support so depending on the timezone, the quality of support might vary. My experience with the Middle East is not great but when it comes to Europe, they are good. From Asia, specifically India, it can be two extremes. In general, support is good. 

The previous company that I worked for had its own ERP.  The switch to Oracle was made because it's a bigger brand with a wide array of products. Oracle is into database within application and it has a number of modules. In addition to Identity and Access Management, it has the WebLogic, SOA and its own server storage's operating system. 

The initial setup takes three or four people. One is the DBA, one is the technical guy and then we have the functional person which could be two roles; one for testing the application for its functional gain, the business process etc., and the other, who does the setups and support work. Within our company we would have more than 100 users of this product. 

Deployment is more complicated and challenging than you'd find in comparable solutions. We normally have multiple iterations for the deployment. One iteration from a DBA perspective normally takes a few days but then there's the functional part, technical part. I expect it would take two to three weeks for that.

If it's just installation of the ERP then you're looking at a few days but you need to consider the environment, amount of customization, functionality, etc. That takes about three weeks because it involves testing, functional setups, technical setups, and the DBA.

The licensing costs for E-business Suite depends upon what modules you're using, the number of users, core database components and things like that. I believe we pay around USD $100,000 annually. There are no additional costs unless you opt for additional products or components.

I briefly thought about evaluation other options, but it didn't happen because I'd already had some experience with Oracle. 

For someone who has never used Oracle, I would tell them that it's not a user-friendly application, so it takes time to get your head around it. On top of that, Oracle is mostly done in Linux and Unix which is completely command-based so from an administration perspective, it's helpful to have some experience and knowledge because it's not a walk in the park. 

Landscapes change and so do the products and services. With that perspective in mind, I would say that although Oracle is a very robust technology and a leader in certain areas, it takes time to adapt to it. Other technologies are far easier to implement but perhaps the complexity makes the job more secure and challenging.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Based on my technical background on Oracle EBS, I can tell that the primary use case of this solution is having a sophisticated software, an ERP, in the environment. It is to have a software system that consists of global business applications with built-in integrity. Generally, my customers use it for their business applications: CRM, Financials, Human Capital Management, Procurement, Supply Chain and more. There are also some seperate applications outside these ERP systems, but mostly, they are also tightly integrated with EBS.

EBS is a software as a whole. It includes its own database (Oracle Database), an application server (Oracle Weblogic), and software. It has cross-industry capabilities and makes customers operate in cost-efficient way.  As an ERP system, EBS offers lots of applications built in. So it helps the customer to automate their back office processes and let them make correct, fast, and reliable decisions. In Human Capital Management implementations, customers benefit from having a complete HR system and do all the HR work using the EBS screens. By customizing the product, customers can make the application processes be compatible with their special needs. Localization and translation options are also available with the product. Although the software is built by an American company (Oracle), other languages can be enabled and localization can be deployed without touching any code. With these features that support having a global software environment, customers who are working worldwide also gain an advantage. 

Using EBS features like Oracle workflow, lots of the processes are automated and made easier. Mobile Web Applications can be used to make the relevant users be able to use the applications directly. Successful implementations, success stories, big install base, know-how and continuous support of the community (Oracle itself and EBS consultants), make the customers feel safe. With the integrated service oriented architecture gateway (SOA Gateway) of EBS, EBS APIs can be triggered outside (from Cloud or from other applications).. This feature lets customers be able to integrate their application with EBS easily. When core business needs something from the back office, it just uses SOA Gateway to retrieve the meaningful data from EBS. All the technology and software is from Oracle. This is also very important to be able to get single vendor support when required. The technology stack is built on Oracle Technologies. It is not hard to find an expert when needed both for development and administration.

When I put these aside, EBS saves time and increases the efficiency for the customers.  By using the tightly integrated application of EBS, customers, provide the solutions for their business from a single source. The ultimate application design, high-level software engineering and power of the Oracle technologies delivered with the product are felt at any moment.

EBS has lots of application families and lots of features. It is modular in deployment and flexible enough to let the customer increase the built-in capabilities and enable new applications when needed. These are very important things at hand in case there will be a need to expand the product capabilities and/or implement new projects.

EBS has a certain history. There is a certain know-how with documentation for almost all its use cases.

The product relies on Oracle technologies, the world's leading Oracle Database and Oracle application tier. This is valuable because, while it satisfies lots of customer requirements and standards, it also means that the technology layer gets continuous improvements and updates, as Oracle keeps the components on this layer always up-to-date.

EBS 12.2, the newest release also provides an Online Patching option for supplying near zero downtime both for applications (functional side) and the technology stack. This is valuable in mission-critical environments. Online patching removes the barriers for an upgrade because it is online. It gives the customers the ability to make downtime negotiations easier. Using online patching, they have planned downtime and it is measured in minutes.

For customers who are using a virutalized environment, Oracle delivers VM templates (for Oracle VM Server). This feature also provides easy enablement for applications.

High availability and disaster recovery architectures make the product continuously operate by any means. Continuity can be guaranteed with these architectures. 

Oracle gives high importance to this product and following a "Continuous Innovation" release model for Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2. EBS 12.2 will be supported at least until 2030.

Administration takes some effort. Administrating the technology stack is not so complex but application aware database administration and following the new methodologies like online patching can be a little complex and time consuming. Oracle should ease the administrators jobs and do some innovation on this administration area as well. Oracle Autonomous Database is Oracle's leading technology these days. Using a similar approach, application stack may become a little more self-managing.

EBS still leverages Oracle Forms technology. Oracle Forms might be considered as an old technology when it puts the client machine into the picture. Clients are using their web  browser to connect to the EBS and use several functionality and applications using the web browser only. However, some applications automatically runs Oracle Forms through a Java applet on the client. Of course, this creates a fast, easy-to-use client experience, but it has disadvantages as well, such as, the requirement to manage the client side java.

I have been using and administrating this ERP system (Oracle EBS 12.2) almost since it was released. I have used Oracle EBS for human resources and financials in one my ex-companies and I have worked in the implementation of several EBS 12.2 projects in different customer environments with different product families. It has been more than five years now. I have also used the earlier releases of this product, such as Oracle EBS 11i and R12).  Oracle continued to enhance the product over the years, so this is a review for the latest release, version 12.2.

It is quite stable. It has been in the market for a long time. It is a product of the Oracle Corporation and was created in late 1980s and Oracle continued to enhance the product over the years. The latest release (release 12.2) was created in 2013. Before that, we released R12 (12.1 and 12.). Even release 11i which is quite old, is still used by customers.

The architecture, code, and support are by Oracle. The product is stable and behaves as expected, according to the documentation. Customers can get the benefit from business continuity, recovery, load balancing, fault tolerance, consistency, and scale-out architecture when the implementation is done accordingly.  

It is highly scalable. It supports scale-out architecture with both load balancing and high availability. Applications can run on multiple nodes and database can run Active-Active on Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters). This increases the computational resources. Note that, this is not only for increasing the throughput, but the high availability as well.

As EBS can leverage Oracle Real Application clusters techonology in the database tier, EBS databases can scale-out by adding database nodes to the configuration.. Thus, EBS database workload can be distributed to multiple Oracle database instances and EBS database throughput can be increased almost linearly. 

Similarly, in the application tier, we can have multiple application nodes working together to increase the application tthrougput.. In this context, we can have multiple application nodes, each have their own application servers (Weblogic), their own runtime and batch proccesses. By having this ability, we can increase application performance and make Oracle EBS handle several concurrent user connections.  Batch processing (which is called Concurrent Processing) can also work in the parallel mode (parallel across multiple application nodes) and can also leverage multiple Oracle database instances to provide better and guaranteed throughput.

When needed, more application and database nodes can also be added to the configuratio. We can also declare the role of these nodes according to our needs.. For instance, we can have one application node for serving the requests of internal users and we can have another application node for serving the requests of external users.. Similary, we can have a application node for serving all the web requests, and we can have another application node only for batch processing.

Having a multi-node application tier also provides high availability. That is, if we use a load balancer and configure our EBS well, application contiunity is guaranteed in case of a application node failure.

Moreover, EBS application and database tiers can be replicated to the disaster recovery sites for disaster recovery.. Oracle Data Guard Technology is used for database replication. A replication tool (such as rsync), a filesystem replication feature or a storage replication feature can be used for replicating the application tier to the disaster recovery sites. 

This type of a configuration can provide application continuity in case of a site failure..  Morever, active dataguard can be used for offloading some production reporting to Oracle EBS disaster site database instances..

Customers get their support from the Oracle support portal (support.oracle.com). Customers can also get local support from the Oracle Partner companies, which are quite capable of both implementing and supporting the solution. Both functional and technical support is available. Additionally, there are lots of public documents available, such as, books and blogs about EBS. This is also advantageous for customers who want to learn the product on their own and keep their support and consultancy cost minimum.

My customers and my ex-companies have used several custom and packaged applications before switching to EBS. They were using different application for different purposes. The applications they were using weren't modular.. 

The decision for switching to EBS was to have a centralized software system for bringing all the required functionalities and applications together. For one of my customer, the decision was made by head quarters which was located in another country. It was a big, global holding company and the head quarters decided to use the same software for all the companies under its control. 

Technically, it is straightforward. However, there are challenges in the functional side. This is expected as implementing ERP is a complex subject. 

When managed with a proper project plan and right resources, projects are completed on time and with success.

In most cases, I was on the vendor team that implemented the projects. In my experience, Oracle partners who are specialized in this area can be classified as experts with knowledge and real life expertise.

By using EBS, and putting almost all the functionality and applications integrated together inside this ERP, maintenance and consultancy costs previously required for different applications and application vendors can be reduced.

The labor and time required for manual data entry is avoided.

A better integration across the divisions is provided with these ERP implementations. This also provides a better visibility and reporting. Also, lots of business processes can be automated.

Thanks to online patching, Customers gain an opportunity to decrease their downtime.

In order to minimize the implementation and consultancy costs, business lines should have proper definitions. They need to have a proper way of retrieving their data, which should be structured well.

Both the current projects and future projects should be defined well. Licensing should be done according to current and near future plans.

Customer should do their sizing and understand their computational resource needs. They need to start sales negotiations according to their actual needs.

Customers should evaluate the partner who is responsible for implementing the project. 
The better the partner, the higher the success rate of the project.

We did evaluate other options. Customers usually evaluate solutions from local software providers. However, most of the time, enterprise customers conclude that those solutions are less capable than EBS. Most of the vendors that supply those solutions are quite smaller when compared to Oracle.. 

According to my experience, enterprise customers also consider SAP. In these considerations, the conclusion usually depends on the costs and are indexed to the success in the sales and pre-sales activities.

Customers can run Oracle EBS on Oracle Cloud today.. If the client's needs and expectations are met and they are compatible with the regulations they are subject to, they can also think of running Oracle EBS on cloud.

EBS r12.2. can be used in many industry  like oil and gas, energy, construction,health and care industries to implement Purchasing,HR,Finance modules in it.

It was complex to follow HR processes, such as leave application, approvals, and job applications. Now, they are integrated and managed from only one screen.

Online patching, which lets administrators apply patches on the fly and with minimum downtime to make it active.

Deployment of customization is complex, thus nobody is using it. Instead, we are deploying the same code on both filesystems (fs1, fs2). In order to follow standards, the deployment process should be as easy as before, in R12.1.

No, but you have to apply latest technology patches after base installation.

Yes, while using Shared Appl_top, you have to use NFS or related technology. But if your admin apps node fails, the second node cannot continue without the primary node. Manual interaction is required.

A seven out of 10.

No.

It was easy.

Do not enable any module that you do not use. Check them and disable, if necessary.

No, decision was already made before the project.

If your requirement is not so complex, give a try. For smaller ERP solutions, Oracle EBS is a complex solution which has complex requirements.

Process costing.

Improved visibility into manufacturing.

Costing: very good, in-depth analysis.

Reporting.

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.

It has improved the way we worked. Everything is now on a very well-centered database. Before, we would have things saved on Excel, but it would be on different versions, or someone would have it saved on e-mail, and it would not be saved as an Excel file. It became frustrating. On Excel it is definitely harder to keep things. With so many people in the company, everybody had his own version. Definitely that created a big disconnect. The Oracle E-Business Suite was not able to get reports. It was not able to get the connectivity. Now, we can use this solution to streamline the documentation and products of our organization.

The database is feature rich, no doubt. It is also a a tool that can easily connect an entire company. From this, you can build any BI orders. The reporting solution is good and it has a good database that connects with everything.

The UI interface is not good. In addition, there is a constant challenge that new things are evolving and people are looking at new ways of connecting. They do not want to log into web interfaces. And, the standard UI does not give you flexibility. You need to have a specialist who will work on the workflow. If changes are made, alerts are required. This provides challenges. 

Additionally, if inventory gets linked with our OEM portals, you enter some number, order number, find the OEM number and then an inventory which you have ordered. You receive the GRN updates your inventory also, links with OEM, and we really good because then you'll know the third party hardware or whatever solution you're purchasing, what is the end of life, where is the end of support, when is the warranty ending, what is the new product coming?

All things can be related. Right now it is a stand alone system that is not integrated, whereas today you're talking about global solutions things can be in database. Even if it is not loud, even then things can be dated because you have only given purchase order to your OEM, you're under warranty. We have the right to get the information. OEM has the right to push information but then ERP is not supporting us. None of the effort goes into that.

The product does not crash. It is stable. 

We have not experienced problems with the scalability of the product. The only problem I have noticed is that sometimes the scales are not available easily in the market. Maybe in the future we will move to Linux or Interface Servers that will provide a lower cost solution. We will have to evaluate this in the future.

We are currently using the technical support because we have a relationship with Oracle to be able to raise tickets. We generally have not had many challenges.

The cost is high for this product.

When deciding on a solution, I suggest looking at the vendor, the stabiliy of the product and the tech support provisions. A business has to run smoothly, and the solution has to help ease that process.

The primary use case for this solution is for Governmental Fiscal Management Information Systems (GFMIS). This is a complete solution to manage the whole country Financial System.

Its user interface is not completely a web interface. It uses a lot of traffic which costs too much for a large number of users scattered throughout the country as they connect from their terminals to do their tasks.

It costs too much. 

We are using Oracle E-Business Suite as our back-office system for HRMS, financials, and projects. We first implemented in 2003 and we've been upgrading to the release 12.2.6 which is our current version. It has been integrated with other Oracle and non-Oracle products.

Since 2013, IT Convergence has been growing at a two-digit pace and Oracle E-Business Suite has been supporting the operations and every new subsidiary/country that we have expanded to, minimizing risks.

We were able to grow from 250 employees, as of our first HRMS implementation, to more than 800 employees. In terms of financials, a 4x growth in revenue since the first implementation was possible by having world-class business software like Oracle E-Business Suite.

The most important features are related to the Financials and Project Management suites. Flexibility in configurations and how it supports business globally in a single instance are definitely the most valuable aspects of the tool.

Reporting is a big area for improvement. It needs to provide the ability to extract data from the suite. Oracle has also been making a great effort to make E-Business Suite more user-friendly but there are still areas where a focus on User Experience would help.

I'd rate it an eight out of 10. It is very stable and has all the required functionality. It's very flexible and capable of integrations. I think the technology has some room for improvement and the lack of embedded reporting creates a need for external 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.

I have been involved in many implementation projects. Recently, we implemented the FAH module in a national bank in Costa Rica, and the accounting creation from several core systems was reduced from days to hours.

It is easy to use and has many functions for facilitating day-to-day work (transactionally speaking). There are a lot of reports and queries available. The GL and FAH modules have become real-deal players for an organization with many legacy systems that handle transactions and where there is a need to create accounting from these transactions.

The supplier invoice payment process is very easy and is integrated from the requisition to the payment (and to creating the asset).

I like very much the way we can control inventories.

Standard reporting needs to be changed. Many of the standard reports look the same as they did 20 years ago in version 10.7.

I would rate this solution at nine out of 10 because there is always room for improvement. Oracle E-Business Suite is very customizable, with a lot of interfaces and processes that can be programmed in different ways. It provides a lot of workflow approvals for different business processes and is adaptable and scalable.

I am a functional consultant for e-Business Suite (and training to go to the Cloud). My experience as a functional consultant covers these modules: GL, AP, AR, PO, FA, ENG, OM, INV, WIP, BOM, FAH, CE, CST.