Oracle Hyperion Reviews

We are system implementors and this is one of the products that we provide to our clients. We implement solutions according to the client's requirements.

The latest use case that I worked on was in the banking sector.

This solution reduces the time required for EPM tasks.

The accuracy of data gathering and consolidation is very good.

The analytical side of the product could be better.

Improvements should be made when it comes to integration with other products.

The reporting capabilities need to be improved.

I work with more than 30 different clients. Some of them are very large, with more than 2,000 users. In total, there are more than 10,000 users.

Technical support from Oracle is very poor.

I have worked with other EPM products. All of them have pros and cons when compared to others.

The initial setup is somewhat complex. On a scale of one to five, I would rate this product a four in terms of complexity.

This solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. They have their own cloud but they are going to utilize the Amazon service for data centers, as far as I know.

The return on investment for this solution is good. I would rate it a nine out of ten in that regard. I have witnessed a lot of major changes in my clients. One such change is that the time required for tasks is significantly reduced. For example, a budgeting task normally takes three months to complete using this kind of solution, and that is reduced to a couple of weeks.

The second point is that there is often a lot of gaps between data gathering, consolidating through the emails, and other processes. There are a lot of mismatching values and the accuracy can be poor. When using this solution, it improves to 99.9% accuracy.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to first clarify what it is that they want to do. What they gain from the product as an EPM differs from vendor to vendor. Each of them has pros and cons. Before deciding on any product, one needs to decide what they value and what they are expecting.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The latest cloud version is more efficient for financial implementations.

The financial model is quite a good tool.

Definitely, there is a scope for improvement. For example, Oracle continuously releases patches. Every quarter they release patches for this solution.

Users have indicated that they do not want the updates as frequently. Patches should be done once a year or twice a year, not quarterly.

From a technical perspective, the technical support could be improved and the price could be reduced.

I have been working with Oracle Hyperion for eight years.

They never seem to have a stable version.

We can start adding, once we start developing it. From an application standpoint, Oracle Hyperion is scalable, we can scale it. I cannot say that from the client, but from the application side, we can add features to the applications as and when they are required.

Oracle support is not quite responsive. We keep raising service requests when we are faced with issues, but they keep giving us solutions that we have already tried. Service requests keep going for months and months. In my opinion, it is not helping very much. Even after raising the severity level one service request, it is ongoing for several months.

Prior to Oracle Hyperion, I have not used any other BPM tools.

The cloud version is easier to set up.

It's too expensive. 

As Oracle's pricing is on the higher end, most businesses prefer to have their own private cloud.

I would recommend this solution to others who are considering it. 

I would rate Oracle Hyperion a six out of ten.

As a developer, I would say that the repository itself is the most valuable feature since I can easily get information and change the behavior of Planning and Essbase.

For businesses, the ability to create forecasts in a fraction of time it took before the implementation is the most valuable feature. Also, the easy manipulation of data for hypothesis tests is very useful.

It provides faster and more assertive forecast cycles. It enables businesses to improve their process since with this tool you can do things easier and quicker as the business can create more complex models than were possible before.

The security could be improved, as it would be good to have security by attributing dimensions.

It also needs more power for conditional formats to disable or enable read/write in the forms based on more conditions, not just changing colors.

It needs more flexible forms similar to SmartView.

I've been using it for over 10 years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There were issues mainly because of a Java memory leak.

It's limited because of WebLogic.

The technical support for EPM is bad. I don't remember anytime that the service support helped me with something. The problem is bigger when you have an environment with more than one product like Hyperion Planning and ODI. This happens because the products have different owners within Oracle and then different supports and, because this, if you open a trouble ticket of loading data to planning and you say the words ODI, you'll be push around the two separate support teams indefinitely, even if your company has an Oracle support director just for you.

EPM is an enterprise suit that is made of some independent tools, and to have all of them working together, it makes it complex no matter your level of knowledge. The bigger the environment, the bigger is the challenge you need to face. Maybe one day Oracle will integrate all their tools. It'll be easier, and the good thing is that I saw a lot of improvements over the years.

I'm a consultant and my only evaluation was on the database. I decided on Oracle because of the database and during my career, their other tools are starting to come naturally.

Because Oracle products are development frameworks, your final results are as good as the people who implemented them. Make sure that your implementation team is the best it could be, at least for the first implementation. If something is implemented incorrectly at the start, it'll cost you a lot more to fix than to build a new system from scratch. Sometimes it can be so badly designed that it is impossible to fix.

I've been working on implementation for 19 years and I have seen bad implementations everywhere. In fact, I have seen the same tools implemented in the same team by two different people, with one being a success and the other a failure. In the same company, one department says that the tool does not work for them and another says that the tool is the best. The only difference was the implementer. Make sure you get a good team to implement it. The tool has its flaws, but most of time (99%) it is the implementer's fault that you have a bad or slow model.

We used another product that was Excel based previously, but Planning is more on the web and lightweight, so you don’t have to worry about the Excel versions. It’s also centrally managed.

The biggest issue we have had for end users was that we lost control of functionality. Some of the problems we have had have since been fixed, but we are having issues with tabbing in all directions and scrolling through in ADF. They fixed this in a simplified interface, but it only lets you launch one application at a time. We cannot move to that interface because we are dependent on the shared workspace launching multiple planning applications.

I’ve used Planning for four years.

The product is more stable than our last solution. Initially, you will have problems, but once you settle, you settle down.

We came from 11.1.2.1 and upgraded to 11.1.2.4. We scale in horizontal multiple planning instances. We don’t have insight into how it was doing in terms of load balancing, but sometimes we go to equal memory use rather than the CPU usage. There is no way to track it, but it’s easy to scale out. The difficult part in 11.1.2.4 where we are seeing a performance issue right now is where we have multiple instances. We have them both up and running, but there are issues.

If it is a priority one ticket, they tend to have the information. If they already have the knowledge to help us, the issue flows through. They don’t have information support though, so there can be weeks or months of back and forth. I also go to the Oracle community when I check for batches of the latest things. There is some useful information and Community is an easy tool.

We did a non product replace upgrade because we are not replacing the hardware infrastructure. We also did a parallel enrollment running because we did not want to take a risk. The parallel enrollment ran with a fresh install from 11.1 to 1 and we then went our own way because Oracle told us that we shouldn’t migrate directly from 11.1.2.1 to 11.1.2.4. We moved the data when we went live and all the facts came through.

Based on the number of products available right now, I definitely think this is one of the good products. They might have issues in the current version, but hopefully those will get fixed soon. The simplified interface is coming up to level but we may still have gaps on the workspace with that simplified interface.

I use it for consolidation and business planning.

Since it is an enterprise-capable solution, people are not worried about security, giving data, the ability to manage complex consolidation, and its ability to modify reporting. So, these are some of the features of the solution.

Evidently, we have a hypothesis. That's why we are building our own product. So, I wouldn't want to dive into the improvements needed in the solution at the moment. Since the UI is outdated, Oracle Hyperion has room for improvement in the area of its UI.

Though I have not directly used the solution much, I have worked with a lot of companies that used Hyperion. So, I've probably had about four to five years of experience with Oracle Hyperion. Also, my company is in no way linked to Oracle.

The initial setup of Oracle Hyperion is very difficult.

I wouldn't suggest others use it since it is too complex to implement.

I rate the overall solution a six out of ten.

My primary use case of this solution is as a full EPM shop, with HFM ,planning and FDMEE reports, as well as all the features available under the EPM umbrella.

There is room for improvement in the on-premises software, which doesn't have as many features as the cloud version, such as the EPBS features or the ability to edit metadata for HFM. There are also a number of bugs and issues present in the product.

This solution's stability is a little problematic - every time we go to a new version, there are bugs and issues, and we don't always get a quick solution or support from Oracle. 

Scalability is one of this solution's big plus points.

The support could be improved as service requests can sometimes take a very long time to be dealt with - we have some SRs that are a year old with no solution. In addition, the quality of the answers from the support team is not always good - sometimes we've had scenarios where we've had to ask the same question repeatedly without getting a useful answer.

Prior to Hyperion, we used Oracle OFA. We moved over to Hyperion after OFA was decommissioned.

The complexity of the setup depends on the application being worked on - some are quite complicated, others are easier.

I would rate our ROI as three out of five.

As long as you are designing the product correctly in the current matter, it should work well. How you design the product should be the most important element of your implementation. The design of the applications is variable - some are well-designed, some are not. Overall, I would rate this solution as six out of ten.

I've been involved in implementing the solution for past clients.

The Hyperion product is designed for performance management, enterprise performance management, and it is applications. It has got write-back and it's got workflow. It's got built-in best practices for taking care of the management procedures, for example, budgeting, planning, and forecasting. It can also be used for financial consolidation - the whole process, including disclosure management, tax reporting, et cetera. It offers a lot of business process features.

In contrast, BI is for anybody that wants to use a lot of information, interrogate it and look at it from various perspectives, but don't want to use it for a business process. We use BI for information purposes and analytic purposes only. It does not have write-back capabilities. It is not something where you can say, "Okay, I can see that I've sold 10 products. Let me see what is going to happen if I sell 16 products in the next five months." You can't do that with BI. You can with Hyperion.

Their latest trend and the most modern approach is to combine BI with Enterprise Performance Management. After the process that you've completed, you want to have BI type of reporting. This will give you the best of both worlds, if the trend continues. You want a data model that makes provisions for that type of analysis and reporting that you want to do. 

For instance, financial consolidation. You can take all the information from the various businesses that you have (even different types of businesses or geographical areas). You can consolidate that, and apply accounting rules to it and do some analysis on it once you start your financial consolidation. That is where the BI comes in.

However, in saying that, the commonality that you have is the nature of the data. The way that the data is structured is common across enterprise performance, management, and business intelligence.

The solution is quite mature.

One can see that it's a mature product because it addresses all the requirements that you must have for financial consolidation and for budgeting and planning. It's really easy to use.

From a business intelligence (BI) angle, it's only a small part of what Hyperion does.

The solution is about to cease to exist, so it doesn't really matter if they add anything to it. It's at end-of-life.

Oracle's strategy is to put those clients that are using Hyperion at the moment onto the cloud, through a new software. Companies will be able to have the cloud software but have the option of on-premise. 

Due to the rich functionality and the breadth of the functionality that it provides, the technical architecture of the solution is quite complex. That is maybe one of the reasons why that Hyperion or Oracle is taking some of the products that have become too complex in the architecture and have decided to rewrite it and put it in the cloud. 

I've been working with the solution for well over a decade. It's been about 15 or 16 years or so at this point.

The solution is quite stable. Very notable and large organizations are able to use it without any trouble, even if they are working in different currencies and across countries.

The solution scales very well.

It is enterprise-class software and typically used by clients that have got massive amounts of data and also hundreds of users. It will handle much more, especially on the financial consolidation side. One of the biggest financial consolidation communities operating in Hyperion is a shipping company that has got businesses in every country in the world. They've got close to 300 users, which is very big for a financial consolidation application. They also have distributed across different currencies, et cetera, and the solution is able to handle it all.

Thousands of companies use the solution, and many have anywhere from 10 to 300 users, or more. 300 users would indicate the company and the solution is scaled quite extensively.

Oracle could do a bit more to support the client. 

The solution is very easy to use and therefore the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

In terms of deployment, for small organizations, it might only take three months or so. For a very large organization, you are looking at a deployment time of approximately nine months.

There are annual licensing costs associated with the solution.

Some people may consider the solution to be expensive, however, for all that it does, anything similar would require the licensing of more than one product.

We don't have a business relationship with Oracle. 

I'm not actually an end-user, however, I have been involved in providing the software and installing it and implementation projects and so on. I've got customers that are using these products and I've been involved with various aspects of these products.

The Oracle Hyperion products also differ slightly. The cloud products differ from on-premise products.

While our on-premise version is 11, we're also using the latest cloud. I'm not sure of that version as it's constantly getting updated.

The solution is at end-of-life and Oracle may only maintain the product until 2030 before moving everyone onto a new solution on the cloud. It's my understanding the new solution will be called Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close.

As the solution is to be discontinued, we'd most likely recommend another Oracle product. We'd likely recommend Oracle FCCS.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature in our experience is the user interface. We've found it really useful as an add-on for the financial part of Excel because it's functionality is geared towards finance users. Our finance users tend to like anything that can make their work inside Excel easier and more efficient.

It empowers users to perform ad hoc analyses themselves rather than having to go to IT or somewhere else. That makes it much more efficient for our users to do their jobs because they have access to data analysis in front of them instead of having to find that information elsewhere.

Oracle should have provided better documentation, and should update it more often. Right now, the documentation is not easy to understand and makes Hyperion that much less user-friendly.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

I think that Hyperion is, traditionally, very complex. It always seems to be buggy to a degree. We're always finding something that doesn't work quite the way we want and expect. But in terms of overall stability, it's very stable.

There are definitely certain limits. I'd say that it's not very scalable.

The initial setup wasn't not very straightforward. Installing Hyperion products requires a lot of effort and a lot of technical knowledge.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

The product itself, right now, especially on the Hyperion planning side, is the industry leading software for what it does. Although it's buggy, I think that's as far as you can get on the enterprise solutions. This is way better than anything else out there.