Oracle HFM Reviews

One of the HFM features that isn't talked about much that is really useful to accountants is the equity pickup module. Equity pickup is an accounting process where legal entities within a company own all or portions of each other and need to pull their percentage of net income into the investment of the subsidiary. Ultimately, as data is consolidated to total company, these investment and equity entries eliminate. But they are important for reporting at each legal entity.

The equity pickup module not only looks at who owns who and at what percentage, it also looks at the relationships and determines the correct order of execution, including any mid level consolidations or currency translations needed. For example, if A owns B and B owns C; first, B would pick up its percentage of C and then A would pick up its percentage of B and also B's percentage of C. If the currencies of A, B, and C are different, each entity is translated into the owner's currency before the pick up is run.

The module is not very appealing to technical users (not a lot of code, simple screen, etc.) but the process is a huge lifesaver for the accountants in the organization.

We picked HFM for its consolidation tools. You can do translations and multi-currency, and it handles the complicated legal structure well.

It has really increased efficiency. Our old system was Excel-based, and HFM has reduced our process closing timelines. HFM’s process management means that once the data is loaded, we can broadcast our statistics to the whole world, then have people look at their data and approve or semi-approve the data we sent out.

The financial reporting tool hasn’t improved much since it was first implemented, and we are struggling with it. Financial reporting is not user friendly, and compared to Excel, there are a lot of features that it lacks. It’s hard for us to create complicated reports; simple reports are fine, but we still use Excel for some of the complicated ones.

We implemented it in 2010, and I started using it a couple years ago.

Over the course of the six years that we have been using it, it has scaled well to our needs. That’s the main reason we wanted to use HFM.

We have IT support for HFM, and they apply patches and fulfill the needs we have.

Our previous solution was only maintained in USD. HFM can handle multi-currency, which is a benefit to us as we can load the data in different currencies and do translation in bill systems. We used to use SAP as our source for translation, and we totally relied on them to feed us the USD amounts. Now, we are doing the translation with HFM and then verifying SAP’s translation, which we found to be wrong most of the time. We really like this part of the system.

I think the Oracle products are really flexible and can do a lot of stuff, but there is a cost associated with that. I would choose HFM, but there are some other products out there that can do reporting, so the choice to buy should depend on your company’s situation and what you want to achieve. It has solved a lot of problems that we had with our old system, and I would rate it a nine out of ten for that.

The versatile data is probably the most valuable feature, since you can access it through the web interface or through Microsoft Office based solutions like Excel, Excel Smart View, PowerPoint and Word. You can tailor it to your needs as well. The language is great. The way that it’s scripted is not very complex so you can easily reuse the code.

Moving forward with some mobile applications would be an improvement.

I have been using the product for seven years. I’ve spent four years as an administrator and three years as a consultant.

There have been some stable cases, but not all of them are.

It's highly scalable for any size company. It's stipulated a virtual server, so you can just add more memory.

They are definitely knowledgeable, but sometimes it takes time to get the right person. There will always be someone who can help you, but to get there can take time and effort.

It is not technically difficult to implement.

I would recommend the product. I would give it a nine out of ten, only because of some of the stability issues.

The ability to prepare our main financial statements.

Decreased time spent on the preparation of main financial statements and cross checking data.

• Format of tables

• Links between pages could be more efficient

2 years

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

8 out of 10

8 out of 10

Straightforward if you follow the instructions.

Consolidation

Time saving during accounting closing periods.

I've used it for five months.

Yes I did have issues.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I didn't work directly with customer service.

We did previously use a different solution, and we switched because of process improvement.

We used both.

Use it.

HFM has the capability of handling consolidations end to end. It handles multi-currency translations, complex ownership calculations and inter-company eliminations and couple of other important tasks.

1. Users were very comfortable using the product
2. Product has ability to handle consolidation and reporting
3. Can receive and club data from multi-source systems and can also handle multi-currency adjustments
4. Hence the close functions and the Management reporting has effectively improvised and the stake holders use this as a primary source for planning for forecasts

Technical architecture wise it was dependent on IIS web server until 11.1.2.3.500 but Oracle dev team did eliminate this from 11.1.2.4

About seven and a half years.

Yes I did. The initial building of HFM is not a cake walk. The deployment will have couple of resolvable issues and there will also be small issues while building application and rules.

Like other products it also has performance issues, but it keeps reducing with the advanced versions.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

7/10.

I do work for a consulting organization and I have been through few implementations.

Not quite sure, but approximately, I could guess based on the business feedback. It reduces the number of days in close cycle and tough training efforts as well. Also the reports are very powerful and therefore it should be around 25% a year.

The other consolidation tools that are available in the market have their own limitations.

HFM is a very successful consolidation tool in the market since it provides an excellent and easy to use interface and the technology behind is very powerful which helps the business to perform the consolidation activities end to end.

Please opt for N-1 version always.

The data consolidation engine is outstanding in terms of speed and functionality. The ability to code the rules used for consolidation and calculation, makes the software fit both simple and very complex consolidation structures.

We are able to do on-demand consolidations of our full dataset – both financial and non-financial – across more than 250 subsidiaries with different ownership structures. To run a consolidation of our full dataset takes approximately 45 seconds.

The user interface for data entry (forms) is very primitive – and lacks common Windows functionality such as copy/paste functions. We hardly use forms anymore due to end-user convenience, and have automated dataloads through system-to-system interfaces as well as data entry through Hyperion SmartView addin in MS Excel.

Four years

The software is designed for very large organizations –it doesn’t really give meaning unless you are consolidating more than 100 subsidiaries.

We have had many tickets running with support at Oracle on the system – sometimes we have been missing a more proactive approach, but in general as expected.

We have had many tickets running with support at Oracle on the system – sometimes we have been missing a more proactive approach, but in general as expected.

The key to success with HFM is well coded rules – I have met many analysts working with HFM and finding the software slow and painful, which is caused by the rules not being written correctly.