Oracle Hyperion Reviews

We use this solution primarily for financial planning and forecasting, to determine how much cash flow is required on a monthly basis.

The roll-up potential of the product is very good, meaning we have detailed information and we want it to be summarized, based on geography, different product lines, or different charts of accounts in the general ledger. It rolls up the information in a very concise way. This makes it easy to understand the overall performance for its forecasting aspects, either quarterly reporting, year-to-year, or month-to-month reporting.

Configuration is a little complex, it's not very easy. The solution is integrated with Essbase and there are not many users of the Essbase database.

If they can provide different modules for each subject area, like supply chain, for inventory forecasting or for order management forecasting, it would make each subject area easier to manage.

I have been using this solution for over 10 years. 

After setup, the solution was stable, it performs well and delivers what we expect from it. 

It's not scalable. It's not scalable. We are moving away from it, with the ERP cloud migration, we will retire this product.

There are over 50 Oracle Hyperion users in our company.

Before using Oracle Hyperion I used Aprimo, a Teradata product. 

Aprimo is very fast, so if we are using a structured dataset it is unbeatable. It's very fast and very easy to set up. It has different modules depending on what kind of forecasting you want to do, whether that's related to planning, to the supply chain, to order management, or to inventory management.

In Hyperion, we don't have those modules, it's complete customization, and it's basically for finance only. These are the basic differences.

Aprimo is expensive, Oracle Hyperion is cheap.

The initial setup was 10 years ago and I wasn't with the company then so it would be difficult to say how much time it took, but we talk about monthly or yearly deployment.

I distinctly remember teams talking about it, it was not easy, and the team used to call it a black box. They called it that due to the number of abstraction layers between data, so nobody knew how it handled the data sets.

The solution was implemented via an in-house team.

The solution is affordable.

We will continue using the solution for now but we will definitely implement a different solution in the future. 

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

I'm the subject matter expert of the finance team, so in finance, we have a vice president who is actually head of the finance dataset. He reports directly to the CEO and is a big fan of Hyperion. He uses it for planning and forecasting each month, with a team of 14 or 15 core members, all of whom use Hyperion.

We also have a sales team and they use the Hyperion datasets for product discounting, based on the previous months track record of customers, they give discounts to the customers.

Oracle Hyperion is useful for financial reporting and budgeting. 

This solution is deployed on-prem. 

Oracle Hyperion's scalability could be improved. 

This solution is stable. 

This solution is scalable, but we are thinking of the cloud to improve scalability. 

There are about 700 users of Oracle Hyperion in my organization. We have plans to increase our usage: when the company grows, the system will grow also. 

The technical support is fine. Previously, the support exchanges with Oracle were difficult, but now it's much better. We manage most things without contacting Oracle. 

The installation is easy, but I'm the admin—we have a partner who manages the installation. I think it took about two to three days. 

For a technical team, we have two people who manage the worldwide financial information. 

We implemented this solution through a partner. 

We pay for licensing yearly. 

I rate Oracle Hyperion an eight out of ten. We are satisfied with this solution and I would recommend Oracle to others. 

This solution allows our users to do quarterly budget forecasts and load information for the next one to five years.

This solution provides a more structured methodology for doing analysis than a tool like Excel. It creates a central database that keeps all information in one place. 200 spreadsheets can be replaced by one repository, multidimensional database. 

Hyperion Planning provides pre-made forms, that make data input easy and shows users step-by-step what needs to be done for the forecast.

The forecasting of values could be simplified in this solution.

This is a scalable solution. It is possible to have thousands of users and store large amounts of data.

Our experience with the support team was not great.

Neutral

The setup was fairly complex. Besides needing servers, software needs to be installed and customized to work efficiently. You need to ensure everything works together and data moves correctly. Web servers have to be running and optimized.

To get a full license, which gives you access to most of the different Hyperion programs, it costs $2000 to $2500 a month.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

This solution has evolved in the last few years. We were using Hyperion, so there was data coming in from other systems into Hyperion. When we were using the on-premises system, we were just moving data from one ERP, e.g. Oracle ERP. When we moved Oracle Hyperion to the Cloud, we brought data from more than one system, e.g. we also brought data from SAP.

We use Oracle Hyperion for consolidation and everything's done on it, but in the past, we did our consolidation in Oracle ERP.

One of the best features that we use in Oracle Hyperion is the data integration. You can slice and dice data, and you can innovate, which is something you can't do in other ERP systems. This solution offers so many possibilities.

Workforce planning is also a valuable feature in this solution that gives you the option to bring in your HR data.

The reporting feature in Oracle Hyperion isn't the best. It needs improvement, but from what I know, they're offering a new reporting package.

There is a new reporting package available in the new tool module, but most companies, e.g. when I talk to friends and even people in my company, they prefer to use other packages like Power BI and Tableau. This means that data will come into Oracle Hyperion, then it will move out and go to Tableau or Power BI for reporting.

If this solution had a good reporting feature from the beginning, then I would have used it, and now that there is one, we don't have the tool. We don't have that license available. If it had been available from the beginning, it would have been great for companies, e.g. we would have been  able to better manage reporting.

I've been using Oracle Hyperion for 10 years.

It's a stable solution, and it has improved a lot in terms of connection. From what I understand, its algorithm is based on your input, usage, and frequency. Data availability has also improved a lot. It also depends on the data center, the domain name, and where the data center is located for your company. Other than the reporting, there aren't many complaints about Oracle Hyperion.

I find Oracle Hyperion scalable.

Oracle Hyperion is very easy to implement. Some pieces are complex, but it's an out of the box solution which works for most companies. It was designed in a way that you can maximize your requirement based on what is given by Oracle and they flesh this solution out every three months.

At the start, we deployed Oracle Hyperion on-premises, then we moved it to the Cloud. It's now deployed 100% on cloud. We are using its latest version.

What I'd like to tell others thinking about implementing Oracle Hyperion is that it's a very sophisticated tool, if used correctly. We've gone through a few mergers and doing the mergers, e.g. people coming from other companies merging with our company, they had experience with other tools. Not every company has Oracle Hyperion, and there were people from the other companies who were skeptics in the beginning as they had never used Oracle Hyperion.

When those people started using Oracle Hyperion, with the solution being something that needs a little time to get used to, e.g. you need to have a good understanding of how the hierarchy and the dimensions, etc. work, specifically for somebody who had not used it, or somebody who wasn't a power user, after the initial learning stage and after using it for a month, those people changed their minds about Oracle Hyperion. They said it was a better solution compared to what they used before the merger.

I'm rating Oracle Hyperion a nine out of ten. It's not a perfect score because it's a complicated tool which requires users to have knowledge on databases.

I'm giving it a high score as it is great for reporting and slicing and dicing of data where you can do a lot of calculations, allocations, and all kinds of things which you can't do in an ERP or any other tool. It would depend on how you use Oracle Hyperion. If you're not using it as much, then you won't be able to compare it with other solutions that are out in the market.

Hyperion has made our budgeting process and forecast analysis easy and robust, and it is a reliable tool. Primarily, we are using Hyperion for our budgeting analysis and to complete our whole budget cycle within the EPM application. We take the HR data from our legacy system, which is Cyborg, and then load it into Hyperion. We have a very specific type of planning application (PSPB) which is meant for public-sector planning and budgeting for governments, and it has most of the built-in, out-of-the-box calculations for us that we used to do in traditional Excel before and there was always a chance of human error. Security was an issue because we did a lot of emailing back and forth with the sensitive HR data.

It secures our sensitive data because it's security-enabled and is reliable with it's back-ups, migrations and restoration methodology. We can do LCM exports and import into target servers and applications. You can back up everything. Security tool is also integrated into the application. I'm happy with the security, how it is handled, and how users can integrate with their Active Directory. You don't have to go out of directory to get user names and passwords.

We're evolving with Hyperion as we move along in our yearly cycles. We have come to the point where the end-users are trained well on it. We don't have to go back and forth with emails, sending Excel files, anymore. We used to have big Excel files that you might not even be able to send through emails. Sometimes you have to put them in some common shared drive and then other users have to get it and then approve it and then send it back. That was not only insecure but it was also a hassle.

With Hyperion, all the design is done in one database, which is the central repository for all users. We have around 30 departments and they have different cost centers, and 150+ users are using the application. They're all managed by a team of around 10 budget analysts in our budget department, so the big advantage is it's all in one central repository for them. We have security-enabled for all the cost centers, and departments can log into it and they only see what they're supposed to see based on their access and based on what department they belong to.

With a big entity like government sectors, we have around 3700 employees. Like I said, we have a lot of users for this application and Hyperion has made it easier to access the data, process it, and perform data integration. Data consolidation is easier and running the reports is very easy. Hyperion has some good built-in reports and we are building our budget book from it, which is a big achievement for us.

We used to build a budget book, which is this thick book you have to print, and so putting it together was a huge challenge because you have to combine all the Excel reports with all the word narratives, format it, and then publish it for the public. Now, it's all being done using Hyperion. We're entering data into Hyperion and then pulling the reports out of there and combining the smart view add-on in Excel. Users can connect to the databases in Hyperion and then using Excel, they can pull the grids/reports, build the budget book, and then publish it.

It's easy, robust, reliable, more secure, and has built-in calculations which avoids human errors.

Not many people are aware of the new feature called Decision Package. We have a very specific tool in Hyperion called Public Sector Planning and Budgeting. It's for government entities, and it's a part of Decision Package. It's used for government entities to budget their positions, their allocations to different departments, their expenses and to create new budget requests, and to create new positions and do their analysis on it. 

The Decision Package is a new feature within this application, and they released it around 2 or 3 years ago. It's working well, but it has a lot of complaints from business users. It is meant for business users, not a technical person, but they always get back to me and ask me a lot of questions and I have to troubleshoot a lot.

Oracle development is still working hard on it, I know, but it's been 3 years and it's still not 100% mature. I have a lot of issues with it. That's one of the areas that I would like to see improvement because we are one of the pioneers in the United States to implement that module in the government sector, so not a lot of users and clients are using it and we don't have a lot of help from our peers. When we talk to different peers, if they don't have it, we don't have something in common to talk about. That's our pain point, and users are having a lot of trouble and we have a lot of complaints about it.

Other than that, Hyperion is a fantastic planning tool. It works great. I always encourage users to use it instead of their accreditation auxiliary reporting, but this tool it puts me down sometimes in front of the business users. If I can't troubleshoot it and I can't give them the answer, I have to create an Oracle SR that can't be resolved in time. We have missed deadlines because of that and I had to create some workarounds from my side. That's how we got it resolved, but it's a huge pain.

It has a lot of limitations, too, on reporting of the text and formatting. For example, with the Budget Book, that's for the whole county and we publish it and we build it out of Hyperion, and if we use the reports from Financial Reporting Studio, we cannot format the way we would like to. It has a lot of limitations on text and formatting. I have tried a lot of formulas to get the format that I want, but it's not fully capable of handling a lot of text data and formatting that I need. That's another area in reporting that needs a lot of improvement.

Some stability issues are there with the Decision Package and the kind of application we have built. It has all the out-of-the-box functionality from Oracle, but it's really complicated. It's not just any hyperlink application, which all or most of the clients are using. It's very particular to government entities and how they budget their chart data and their expenses for the whole county. It's a lot of data. We have a data budget worth almost $2.5 billion, which is a lot to handle with all the different accounts and awards, projects, programs that are within our hierarchy. 

It has some stability issues. Some bugs are still there, but we have workarounds which are working fine. I would like to see improvements in the specific area that I was talking about.

We are using two tools for reporting. One is the SmartView app that's used with Excel. I like it a lot. I told all of my users to use it because it has all the drilling and rolling and all the capabilities for analysis of online database applications. The other tool, which is called Financial Reporting Studio, is not user-friendly at all and it can improve a lot. It has potential to have some improvement from Oracle from a development point of view. It needs a technical developer to build the reports out of that tool, which is not good for the business users. They try to learn it but it's too complicated for them and it's clumsy and it's not as simple as using, of course, the Excel reporting that they are used to. There are not a lot of options that are available for reporting in Hyperion other than these couple of tools.

A lot of functional users or managers involved in buying Hyperion don't realize what they're buying and what it's capable of. So, requirement analysis is the key thing. Before you talk to an implementer, determine what it is that you need and what tools Hyperion has available.

There are different tools for different purposes -- planning, forecasting, financial analysis, etc. The tools in Essbase is a little different from the tools in Hyperion. Before Oracle acquired Hyperion in 2006, it wasn't so mature, but not with the acquisition, it's expanded a lot and it much bigger than it was 10 years ago. You now have different out-of-the-box functionalities for each tool that serves the purposes of your requirements.

The key thing is to analyze and see, do you need Essbase or do you need Planning? Within Planning, what is the specific tool? We are using Public Sector Planning and Budgeting, and within that tool we are using the Position Only Model, and in that tool we are using the Decision Package Enable Application, so that's a key thing.

You need to see what you need and go for the implementation. That's why the implementer partners are there.

It's very easy to use and the functionality is quite complete. And it's easy even if you're not very familiar with BI technology. Most notably very easy and intuitive transformation from relational schema to multi dimensional schema. Complete tabular data presentation with full drilling process and statistical functions. Corresponding charting data presentation with full drilling functions. Full interactive reporting including tables and charts. Join unlimited queries into different databases.

Its GUI could use some refinement. I think it's easy to use, but it's hard to say because we are very familiar with this product and have been using it for many years. For a new user, this product should be updated to work better with the environments of new operating systems. Modernizing the user interface is something I would suggest. But, in terms of overall functionality, I have no complaints. At the same time, I don't know if I'm objective after having used it for so long. I don't know if a new user would have the same opinion as I do.

I have been using this solution for about 25 years. It used to be called the Brio Intelligence Suite. And then Brio was acquired by Hyperion, which was subsequently absorbed by Oracle. As they have done with Zibo, Oracle has incorporated all these BI tools into their BI platforms.

The Oracle technical support in our area is terrible. They don't offer support. Whenever we need it, we try to find solutions online. Before Oracle purchased the suite, support was okay. Oracle is a huge company and its focus is mainly is its database business. All the other businesses are complementary to this company and BI is not an exception. Generally, support is not Oracle's strong suit. Oracle is not interested in many of its products. They are purchasing the products in order to have access to the client

I would rate the Hyperion Business Intelligence platform eight out of 10. However, I would not recommend this product to a new user. When we started with the Brio platform, which has passed several stages of ownership, this product was a  highly rated product. That's why Oracle acquired it. The global user base was huge and we were doing business with this product. 

But after Oracle bought this product and it was abandoned, in a manner of speaking. They do not support it. They do not update the product. Although my opinion as a long-time user is generally positive, I would not recommend this product to a new user. Nowadays, there are other products that are better supported and updated by companies that have either bought them or developed them.

I use Hyperion for BI and BPM planning. 

Hyperion is helpful for all our budget processes.

I have a problem with Hyperion when I need to log some changes in the budget. It's hard to know who made which changes in the budget. Also, since I am using the old version, I'm having some issues with the compatibility between the software and the browser. I think Oracle should package Hyperion with a browser so I won't have these problems. 

I've been working with Hyperion for about a year. 

Hyperion is highly reliable. 

I think Oracle's support isn't very good. 

I rate Oracle Hyperion nine out of 10 because I very much like it. 

We use Hyperion for the consolidation process in our accounting department. Other departments work without our reports and analyze the information from Hyperion. 

The solution is deployed on-premises. We use the latest version.

There are 13 people in my team who are using this solution.

It's a very good program and it's useful for consolidation.

Hyperion allows us to update information and shows us reports, our balance, and P&L.

The analytics could be improved. I think we need the cloud version.

If I want to get information from a company, I need to send an email and they give me information from SAP, but not Hyperion.

When I want something to be improved, I work with our finance support team and they make the changes. 

I have used this solution since 2009.

It's stable. I would rate the stability as 4.5 out of 5.

We also use SAP and Microsoft Dynamics.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. I would recommend it to new users. I know of many companies that want to use Hyperion in their accounting departments.