What is our primary use case?
My company is called ProfitFromERP. We help people select and implement ERP solutions. I don't personally use Hyperion day to day, but have clients who've selected and grown with the program. Hyperion historically has been a high-end tool for financial planning and analysis groups who want to create things like forecasting models and work with real-time data and events in-progress to update rolling forecasts.
Hyperion is useful for advanced financials, reconciliations, and other things that traditional accounting and reporting solutions don't do. Some people use it for their SEC reporting and things like that. Others are trying to compile data from multiple sources - various databases and transactional systems.
For example, we've got hockey teams that cross-reference ticket data and information from third-party concession stands to get a complete picture of what's happening in their entire stadium. It provides them with real-time information from point of sale systems, Ticketmaster, and gate scanning systems, all so they can optimize staffing in every section and maximize revenues by having the right staff in the right place.
What is most valuable?
Hyperion has always been a top financial solution, but it had the reputation of being complex and not-so-easy to use. As with any complex & powerful program, with the right training, users could really do some amazing things. In the early days, implementing Hyperion was complex, but implementing any enterprise software in the early days was complex. Experience was the key - if you had great consultants and a top FP&A team, it was a dream. If not, nightmare stories were the result. Today, with modern cloud-based systems everything is easier, not easy, but easier to implement.
There's also been significant development around Hyperion. We've had clients look at Hyperion in ERP evaluations circa 2016 - and there were new cloud versions, but the functionality just wasn't there. One of the things we school our clients on is the rush to convert to the cloud has many software products with a two or three-year cloud history that initially look great, but later just don't have the breadth and depth of features. They'll look great in initial demos but later you find key requirements that it just won't handle. This can be a real problem - so we make sure our clients dig a little deeper.
Fast forward to 2020-ish and all of the sudden we saw NetSuite clients choosing Hyperion, or at least seriously considering it. Technically, Oracle had launched a version called SuiteSuccess Planning & Budgeting and it was all based on the Hyperion Planning code.
NetSuite has always had good base financials and really handy features like saved searches for repeated reporting. But when it comes to advanced financials, historically, most NetSuite resellers presented Adaptive Planning, which was so tightly integrated it appeared as just another module on the NetSuite home page.
We also had Advanced Financials clients evaluating Host Analytics, Anaplan which started to emerge, Workiva, as well as BI tools like QlikView and Tableau. One of the joys of cloud-based NetSuite was how tightly we could integrate with almost any other cloud-based tool.
When Oracle brought NetSuite back into the fold via a $9B acquisition, of course, Larry Ellison was an early seed investor in NetSuite, but the merger brought NetSuite's cloud expertise and cloud market share and factored Oracle's massive development efforts to rapidly expand NetSuite's offerings in several ways.
They launched that cloud version of Hyperion with the goal of becoming nearly plug-and-play integration with what NetSuite was doing. That's when our NetSuite client base began to really take another look. Plus some of the firms that had selected Adaptive back when it was sold as NetSuite Advanced Financials, those companies had really grown and what had fit well with a $400m company was hindering a $900m company.
For how long have I used the solution?
We had some clients who adopted Hyperion two years ago.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Hyperion scales well because it has traditionally been available only to massive corporations. It was an expensive product. You only saw it with Oracle Fusion or other tier-one products that don't play in the mid-tier market. Oracle bought NetSuite. Technically, Larry Ellison owned 60 percent of the stock before, so it's hard to say that they bought it, but they brought it back in-house as an Oracle product.
NetSuite revolutionized the middle market for cloud software, and they were highly successful. Oracle started saying, "Well, you're not worldwide like our other products." The answer was, "We don't have versions for all those other countries. NetSuite's not for the bigger companies because it lacks all the features those companies need."
Oracle put a lot of money into developing NetSuite to take it global. I went to a training class for their implementation methodology a year and a half ago, and there were 40 people in the class. Around five of them were based in the United States, and five were Oracle employees from one division or another. The rest were from Asia, Japan, Australia, Ireland, England, and France. It was a complete international group, which shows how much progress they've made in that direction. Many products that worked with the higher-tier Oracle software are being repurposed to work in the NetSuite arena.
That has given them more functionality to present to NetSuite, which has grown phenomenally. In 2018, NetSuite had 18,000 client companies. They recently surpassed 33,000. That's phenomenal growth. Oracle invested tons into the development of a product that's already leading the market to open it up to more companies that need things like Hyperion and expand into countries so they can replicate the success they've had in the US.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Our client base is comprised of companies moving from different solutions and switching for various reasons. Company growth, changing marketplaces, emerging cloud options, digital transformations, remote workforces, changing supply chains, direct e-commerce options, and even startups and companies approaching IPO and moving off accounting programs to full-fledged digital ERP-based operations.
I've worked in the Sage channel, Epicor, and Microsoft - including Navision/AX, Infor's Lawson M3, so I've enjoyed a career dealing with local, regional, and national companies, and with some of the bigger ERP packages, international and global conglomerates.
In every instance, knowing what clients face and what makes them need to change is critical to understand.
At one point, we were working with pharma groups facing $3-5 million dollar SAP and Oracle implementations and we could recommend looking at Microsoft Dynamics AX in the $1.2m range. Years later, it's seeing NetSuite $500k systems instead of Dynamics $1m+.
Today it's home-based workforces spending more on home furnishings, meaning home goods distributors need an e-commerce platform because no one is shopping in traditional furniture stores, as it's online.
Aerospace is driving manufacturing efficiencies and handling supply chain issues differently than in the past.
There are hundreds of factors driving business innovation in all sectors - Food & Bev that used to be packaged for restaurants now needs consumer pack-offs and new ways for consumers to buy online. Connecting with Amazon or Walmart distribution channels requires digital integration.
The world has changed faster with the advent of made-for-cloud ERP. NetSuite, Intacct, Plex, Acumatica - it's all about finding easier-to-implement, lower-cost systems that fit client requirements.
Keeping track of all the options, as well as knowing what the software publishers are doing with programs like Hyperion (or SuiteSuccess Planning & Budgeting) is key to letting our clients know what the up-and-coming options are.
That said, if I go into a shop and their director of FP&A has been using Host Analytics or Adaptive, it's going to be challenging to get them to switch from a tool they know to Hyperion or anything else. In those cases, we build the integrations. It's so much easier to integrate cloud-to-cloud tools than it was 20 years ago, so it's not that big a deal. And if you've got somebody who knows another product in and out. They don't want to go through another six-month or nine-month learning curve to get proficient with another tool.
We don't see people changing a lot, but there's sometimes a re-evaluation when a company starts growing and says, "We need to do more with our financials than we've been doing. We want to look at these FP&A solutions side by side. We want to see the advantages of one versus the other."
How was the initial setup?
Deploying Hyperion is much easier than you would think. It's relatively quick—about 60 days if you're running multiple databases. The scale of the implementation is way down. My clients are generally NetSuite, not Oracle Cloud or Oracle E-Business Suite.
It's extraordinary compared to what we had seen in the past. In 2018, our impression was that Hyperion was not ready for prime time. We had done a couple of evaluations, and they quoted what the implementations would be. It was just like, "Oh my gosh. This is killing the project. It's too expensive." We were amazed at how affordable it had become in recent years, and the clients were pleased that they could get into a Hyperion-level tool at an affordable price.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I listened to a CFO recently - his complaint was not being able to fully understand the costs associated with the project. They'd really done their homework, ran a super tight project management team, overcome huge implementation challenges, and successfully rolled this behemoth $900k ERP project out. It was six weeks late and $75k over budget and the entire reputation of the project within the company was that the project was a failure.
Now by any realistic measure - getting a huge ERP project rolled out to a large company is not an easy lift. They were so close to the goal, yet perceived as a failed project, which is kind of devastating when you're in charge and demoralizing to the entire team.
The truth is, you don't know what you don't know.
One of the things that Profit From ERP preaches is changing the goalposts. Instead of an arbitrary go-live date, we focus more on goals like 'within 6 months after go-live we'll reduce inventory by 7%.' Now, instead of starting as a failure, we're working toward success. I know it sounds simple, but it changes perception, identifies steps toward goals, and measures progress - which the ERP is designed to do in the first place.
Plus, having done hundreds of ERP implementations, our goal is to help negotiate licensing and implementation costs - but we also recognize there are hidden costs that will surface during implementation, staffing, and support changes - and we're having our client companies recognize that unseen costs and common and expected, so budget for them.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Oracle Hyperion nine out of 10.
