Oracle Hyperion Reviews

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.

We used It was used for budgeting, monthly management reporting, and forecasting.

Oracle Hyperion is an engine allowing you to build whatever you want on it.

Oracle Hyperion generally it's quite a complex architecture that is hard to maintain.

In our case, the issue was with the lack of people in Kazakhstan who know the product. there is a very limited number of resources available on the market.

I have been using Oracle Hyperion for approximately 11 years.

I have found Oracle Hyperion to be stable.

The scalability of Oracle Hyperion is not that simple. However, for our usage, we do not have any performance issues. We didn't try to scale it that much.

Previously to using Oracle Hyperion we were using Excel.

The installation is at a medium difficulty level. It is similar to Oracle E-Business Suite.

Oracle Hyperion was implemented with the help of an integrator.

Oracle Hyperion is not an inexpensive solution.

I would advise others to use a cloud solution if there is one available.

I rate Oracle Hyperion a seven out of ten,

Essentially, we use Hyperion for financial reporting and tracking.

We like the reporting and tracking of financials.

I think the user interface could be made a bit easier and user-friendly.

The initial setup could be easier, and there could be more integration with more ERPs.

There is always room for improvement. 

There can be an improvement in many regards with the dimensions, the metadata, the interfaces, as well as the integration.

I have been working with Oracle Hyperion for two years.

We are using the financial management version.

It's a stable solution.

It's a scalable product.

There are more than 40 users in our organization who are working with this solution.

Technical support has been good.

Previously, we did not work with similar products.

As an administrator, I don't find it to be very difficult, but from the user's perspective, It could be simplified.

We don't need much maintenance because it's a stable product.

If the group is large enough, then I would recommend going ahead with this solution. It's a very good tool for reporting and consolidation.

I would rate Oracle Hyperion an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for Oracle Hyperion was planning and budgeting.

My role in the company is on the support side.

This is a customizable product. Our implementation was designed to fit our needs.

The user interface is in need of improvement. The forms should be more user-friendly.

Initially, we had some integration issues. However, these were solved after we submitted a couple of service requests.

We were using Hyperion for approximately eight years.

As of last week, we no longer use the original Oracle Hyperion. We have moved to the cloud version of the product.

Overall, the stability was okay. We did not have to raise many issues with support.

Scalability-wise, Oracle Hyperion is okay.

We did not have to raise many issues with support because we were only using the planning and budgeting features. We did initially have some integration issues and these were solved after we set up a couple of service requests.

Overall, the support is okay.

We were using Oracle Hyperion but have transitioned to the Oracle EPM Planning Cloud.

We switched because the support was ending and we decided to move to the latest version.

The deployment was done by a third-party implementation provider.

As of now, the Oracle Hyperion product is out of support, so I would not recommend it to anyone. Anybody that has it will not be supported by Oracle.

For anybody who is still planning to implement this product, my advice is to consider their needs during the initial implementation phase. The one that we were using was designed to fit our needs and anybody who plans to use this product should identify what forms and screens they will need. That is configurable at the beginning.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Centralization of the budgeting process. Our company was using Excel spreadsheets to capture all the managers' spreadsheets. They kept being changed by the managers and were never actually frozen in time. Very hard for top management to freeze the budgets.

Reduced budgeting process from six to eight months, to three months. Locking the budget process for the managers permitted us to control the data. No one was doubtful about which versions of the budgets they were working on.

• Flexibility
• Quick to add enhancements and adapt the tool to business requirements
• Little involvement from the IT department

Everyone was looking at the same numbers. As data was entered during the budget process from lower management, upper management had the live consolidated budgets.

The learning curve is pretty steep. For people coming from a relational or star database background, users configuring Essbase need to learn a new way of manipulating the data.

Three to five years.

Our primary use is for Enterprise Performance Management (in most cases), planning and budgeting, and as a reporting/allocation tool.

We provide customized solutions for finance offices in any industry.

Oracle has an integrated solution for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Hyperion. It keeps the two platforms opened up to each other.

Oracle EPM Cloud solutions have simplified the security model. Nevertheless, it would be better having  a more differentiated security model.

I have worked for more than seven years with Oracle EPM and Hyperion.

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.

The fact that you can handle and process a lot of data in a very short time is the most valuable feature.

We showed a lot of demos of these solutions, and a lot of clients that we demonstrated to are very much impressed. It has increased our clientele, so we have a lot more of clients in my company for this application.

It's way ahead of the competition. IBM Solutions have gone down a lot in the last few years and the future is Oracle. So, for now, I don't see any features in IBM that should be improved. It's very good for now.

I don't think that this product needs any improvement for now. I am quite satisfied with the application that we have, it is working just fine. For clients who have a good understanding of the product, it is enabling them meet their deadlines. So for now, I don't think it is necessary for me to consider.

I have used this solution for five years.

Stability is good.

Nine out of 10.

Previously, we were using IBM.

The setup was very straightforward, it is easy to use.

This was the only option that was given to us.

I would always recommend this solution.

It is very versatile, it is easy to use, easy to access, and easy to set up.

I am very satisfied with and keen on this solution.