Oracle Hyperion Reviews

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.

Hyperion tools are very useful in finance. For example, the data relationship management is good for anything that you need to store hierarchical information about, and can be used for data enhancement and modeling. It has a lot of features that assist other parts of the organization as well, but the tools evolved around financial organizations.

In finance, if you have a central repository feeding all of your downstream systems of the metadata that you use, you reduce the number of account reconciliations and report reconciliations that you have to do. It also gives you data quality.

I think that Oracle in general is moving towards cloud technology to remove some of the costs associated with, for example, the EPM suite. The EPM suite, as its capabilities increase, requires upgrading your servers and keeping up with the technology. By going to the cloud, customers are able to avoid those costs.

Once the Oracle products are installed, they're pretty stable. A lot depends on how they're set up, and a lot depends on making sure that you adhere to best practices.

All the Hyperion products that I'm involved with scale very well. They're designed to handle large businesses. People sometimes want to do strange things. They push the tools to the limit, for example. They want to do consolidation of the product level or a customer level, and then it gets a little more complicated.

Most of the problems that we find with the products that we deal with go to Oracle for service. They have a good service organization 24/7.

Our organization has staff dedicated to the infrastructure. There are a lot of intricacies to setting up the products. It's useful to get professional people involved, especially with some of the more complex stacks features that you need to make the whole suite operate. As the products have evolved, they've merged more of the technologies together, so they're more dependent on making sure that you set the right parameters.

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. For what they're designed for, the tools are very useful.

We use mostly S-space planning, and have HFM and FDM as well. We're able to support fifteen to twenty countries globally from Cincinnati, and they can do all their consolidation on our one HFM application.

We have had a little difficulty with financial reports being buggy in the client.

We have been using it for about six months.

It has been pretty stable. We're on premise. Every once in a while we will have crash, but it’s usually nothing a reboot can’t handle.

It seems to scale pretty well. We just recently brought on another country and are in the process of building the application for them.

A big benefit for most of our users is that you can use it in Excel with a Smart View API. It does require a little bit of training when you first start using it though. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

For me, Smart View has been the most valuable feature, because you can use most of the Excel points.

We can do budgeting on time and provide an accurate forecast. You can also have budget, actual, and plan within the same report.

We usually do granular level of forecast or budget, and Oracle needs to start supporting that.

It is stable.

We have had more data to manipulate every time on promises. We have to scale a lot. It would be great if they could bring out all the cloud functionality on promises.

Most of the time it takes three months and you don’t get results. I think the Oracle support is concerned about the cloud.

If you get the product, attend boot camp training and then start getting hands on. I would rate it a 7 out of 10.

The ease of use and the integration with our business are the most valuable features. We require less IT support, so the business and functional people can do more and more of the work they want to do.

I think they are going to have a better, faster, cheaper close process and BI. From a reporting standpoint, it won’t be pure BI.

There should be more effort put into integration processes. There area lot of products that work best together, but figuring out how to get them all to work together is still a challenge. Since there is a lot of overlap between the products, knowing exactly which parts of which products to use at what time is a challenge, and is where technical requirements still exist for us.

Stability is actually really good. About fifteen years ago, Hyperion implementations were sketchy. There were a lot of failed applications that never got off the ground. There are much less today. Most implementations are successful now, and Oracle has become significantly more efficient in standing them up. There are not many issues.

Scalability is great. I think that it’s one of the strongest points. I've worked as an independent for a lot of different types of companies, and I've seen Hyperion work well at large international banks and mid-size manufacturing companies.

Tech support is pretty good. There are certain issues that pop up that are critical or require patching of the application, and that can be a long, drawn-out process. If I could make any change, it would be providing a way to quickly realize where there is a true problem, so you don’t have to work through level three, then two, then one, which takes weeks of time to finally get to resolution.

Since every company does it a little bit differently, there aren’t any best practices. Larger companies have tickets and dedicated IT and technical administrators. Smaller companies have advanced super users who pretty much do everything. Some companies follow very strict processes of taking new implementations and running them through dev tests, then into prod. Other companies make changes right in production. It’s really across the board.

It's complex. Oracle is addressing that issue with the cloud services. It's surprisingly popular as well. I was surprised at how quickly companies were putting their financial data up on the cloud. A lot of that is because the implementation process is a pain point, because there are so many ways to do it. Between Windows, Linux, all the different external applications, hardware and software configurations, it's tough. If you can relieve that, then you pull the hardest and most expensive part out of the equation, from an IT perspective. A tool for that would really service the business, since all of your investment dollars are really going towards the functional implementation.

Focus on functionality and on your business. Make sure you understand what the business wants to do. No company uses more than fifty or sixty percent of the functionality of an application, so don’t get caught up on every single bell and whistle and try to implement all the features. Just implement the parts of the product that are specific to your needs. I would rate the product a solid eight out of ten.

It is a multi user web based system, which is easier for us to deploy since we have a global presence. That was our most important goal at the time we purchased the solution. The forecasting and the fact that all the users can have input are valuable as well.

They could make it less complicated. Less maintenance and lower costs would be great. Also, I would like to see some improvement in the reporting studio. It practically hasn’t been touched and is kind of static.

We have been using the product since 2007.

At the beginning, it was not that stable, but the software has been getting better.

It's not very scalable. If I wanted to add another hundred users tomorrow, it wouldn’t do that. We are not on the cloud system though, so it probably works better if you are.

The support at Oracle is so specialized, even within a single product, because each product has several components. When you have a problem, you have to go through a lot of different specialists within Oracle to find a complete answer. I prefer to just have a single stop with one person taking care of the issue.

It is not going to be cheap. It's a premium product, so it's going to be expensive.

It’s not going to be simple. If you are a small company, there probably is a better product out there. If you’re a huge company, it is probably going to be a fit for you. I would rate the product an 8 out of ten.

The reporting is the most valuable feature for us. If, for example, finance wants to know their P&Ls for their various channels, they can get that data. The fact that Hyperion is a consistent system without any big issues is huge for our users to make decisions based on financial results.

It's not complex, at least our set up isn't complex. There are lots of tools and we have our core services. We don't have a lot of strategic finance data in it, so our footprint is fairly small, making it easy to manage.

The biggest business benefit is allowing P&L reporting to happen when needed. It helps us drive financial results to where it needs to be.

Our system is user-managed at our location. So long as the system is up and running and available, our users can do what they need to do. Occasionally, though, we get issues such as process hangs or something similar, although they're usually known bugs the fixes for which we can find in Oracle support fairly easily.

We have some process hangs occasionally, but they're usually small and easy to fix. Other than that, we don't have any major issues with deployment.

Stability has been good on as we have a small footprint. It's reliable and we don't have to do much with it; we just let it run.

We've had not had to scale it up at all. We basically have had the same hardware with that for the last 5 years.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It's not a complex thing and it went in great. We actually migrated from an old environment to a new environment on that one. We brought data forward, although there were some small issues here and there as we got it up and going, but nothing that wasn't documented or fixed.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

It goes back to your reporting and what you want to get out of it. Hyperion seems to be a very good product and it seems to be pretty stable. It's something that you can give to your users to just use. It's pretty hands-off most of the time.