Oracle E-Business Suite Reviews

We implement Oracle EBS R12.2.5 in various companies, including financial and manufacturing distribution companies. The Oracle solution covers finance, procure to pay, order to cash, and inventory with process manufacturing or discrete manufacturing.

With Oracle EBS, the customer gets a better cost calculation and an integrated system between departments. Oracle EBS also provides the customer with faster financial closing because of its accurate calculations. Customers have previously used local ERP, Acumatica, SAP, and old systems such as FoxPro.

• Ledger and Subsidiary
• Operating Unit
• Inventory Organization and Location
• Subinventory and Bin
  
• In our financial information, we can utilize trial balance on the operating unit level. This feature is very useful for our distribution company.
  

Currently, Oracle is focusing on their Cloud ERP. Since Cloud ERP is being rebuilt from scratch using a different technology, it seems that their on-premise support is slow and unresponsive. This differs with SAP Strategy, whose cloud solution is moving to their on-premise solution.

It essentially runs our business, from our financials to manufacturing to supply-chain to planning instances. They all tie together with E-Business Suite to keep our business on track and running.

After we migrated to Oracle EBS from PeopleSoft, we had a little bit of a learning curve adopting new technology with a new look and feel. But our users have really latched onto it and learned it, and it matches up pretty well with our business process and what our users expect to be able to do.

The biggest area for improvement would be in the area of user adoption. After we did our first upgrade and went through the whole process, our users hated Oracle. So my biggest complaint would be the lack of Oracle support for end-users to resolve their issues after that first upgrade. It just wasn't a good experience.

We implemented it back in 2012.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been pretty stable. Any issues that I've seen are just day-to-day, normal issues. Every now and then we might see performance issues which are easily solved with a good team of DBA who can usually diagnose the problem. From the software perspective, there are patches available when we run into bugs and other issues.

We've had not had to scale it up at all.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, and we didn't start out with any customizations or anything like that. I think it was pretty straightforward, getting that business process around it.

We had our hosted partners and DBA team install it. I think a lot of things we had to match back were business processes from our ERP. Whatever ERP you're going to pick, there's going to be little hits against it. There are going to be a lot of things it does well and a lot of things it doesn't do so well. We seem to match up pretty good for what we're wanting to accomplish with it.

Advice depends on what your business is. If you're a financial company, you might have different requirements. For a manufacturing company, like us, it seems to be the best fit for what we want to do. Again, it's your requirements and what you're trying to get done with it.

We had an issue in which access should be made by the tax team and not necessarily the team entering the transaction. Oracle, however, has now made taxes a separate module for E-Business Suite, and with it, the tax team knows exactly what they have access to and what issues they need to fix. The tax module allows us to set up rules for the tax team to better do their job.

We've proposed many changes to Oracle. For example, we'd like to be able to customize a single specific piece of E-Business Suite without having to customize the entire structure. I'd also like an auto-review function so that we're able to see certain information without accessing it only if the management team asks us to.

We've been using it since 2004.

We've had no issues with deployment.

The stability is really 50/50 right now. It could be issues with certain pages or data, or it could be a training issue on our end.

It's scaleable. Oracle provides pretty good data plans for E-Business Suite so that you can customize using Java if you want.

The level of technical support depend on which analyst I'm getting through to. Sometimes they're pretty good, and other times they just throw their hands in the air.

The initial setup is pretty good now. Every page has help associated with it.

The most valuable feature for us is integrity in the sense that the General Ledger module is directed connected with our payables. And our Human Resources is connected with payroll, so it's one unit from HR's perspective, which is very efficient. Also now, we have the iRecruitment module, so it's a single continuum from HR to finance. We don't have to deal with different software.

Another important aspect for us is safety in the marketplace. We know it's not going to go away and that our investment in the solution is OK.

I mainly support human capital solutions, so the biggest benefit for me has been with the iRecruitment module that took very paper-driven tasks to just a few clicks. It's saved me a lot of time and provided connections between tons of separate interfaces.

iRecruitment is, however, a very weak module that gets a lot of user complaints. And even though we get good responses from Oracle Support, it's really clunky and is one of the weakest module that I think Oracle has.

We also didn't like the Time and Labor module. We replaced it with Chronos, and that's made a big difference.

I've been using it since 1999. Back then, we used only basic applications such as Payables/Receivables, Ledger Projects, HR, and payroll. We went with iProcurement in 2005 and then iRecruitment in 2006.

The issues with deployment depend on which modules are deployed as well.

We've had no issues with instability.

We've been able to scale for our needs.

The TARs assigned to us have improved a lot over the years. They have a lot of scripts that can be registered as concurrent. Previously in 1999, I'd have to think twice before logging a ticket because it was a back-and-forth nightmare. Now we can chat online very quickly.

As a developer, I have no power or decision in the selection process. But I think it was market presence and the stability that won over management. We purchased PeopleSoft before Oracle acquired them, and after they did, our whole organization uses Oracle now.

I think that the initial setup is complex, especially since we were unfamiliar with the software. We were talking to consultants who were unable to relate to us. We were coming from a mainframe world and a lot of our decisions were wrong. I don't fault Oracle for that, though. It's just part of any implementation.

Getting the right consultant is key, and sometimes rapid implementation doesn't pay.

I'm an Oracle die-hard, but I think that iRecruitment and Time & Labor are very weak.

The system is reliable and the backbone of financial and other core systems in many organizations worldwide.

It has improved our business processes.

• Interfaces (downstream and upstream)
• End user interface (UX design)
• Performance
• The EBS Design to some extent is still monolithic.
• Maintenance activities still require a lot downtime.

I have used the solution for five years.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Satisfactory.

Support on Unix platforms is good.

I used Oracle Applications 11.0.3. This was an upgrade (out of place) to 12c.

It is very complex as its tightly coupled with business processes and also involves a very large number of interfaces.

Vendor plus in-house.

It's quite secure and fast, and we get an end-to-end solution.

Whenever you are growing, you get new products on the database server level, application server level and software. It definitely grows as your needs increase.

They started on the mobile app and tablets, but still I see there are no short-forms used in EBS, which are not I’m seeing coming on the tablet. Maybe increasing that will help because now everyone carries their tablets and handheld devices. You don’t need to go back to your seat and do anything if you are in the store or anything: warehouse.

You don’t need to spend time going back from there, you can solve the issue.

I’ve been using it for the past 13 years (approximately).

I started using Oracle applications from around 2003, from version 11.9 onwards. I have done some work on 10.7 as well, and from there, onwards.

It’s quite stable. Wherever you have issues you can get some patches on a one-off. We have CPU half-yearly and all those kind of things that makes it like whatever known issues, you can get rid of those beforehand.

No.

Overall, support is good. Earlier, we used to have MetaLink, now we have support with Oracle.com. We can pay the Support Representative or we can find so many documents and all that, but still there is a thing if you need anything development related, then SRs and getting solution may take up to years of time. That is a kind of thing I’d like to get rid of.

If a person is knowledgeable, it’s good enough.

Definitely I’d say data and different application, new servers and 12c and Database, all these have very cool features and In-Memory and EBR.

They should use these things more to get the most out of the solution.

This is our ERP and we are using it for our entire supply chain flow, i.e., from the start of the billing to the shipping process. We are using the Oracle E-Business Suite for mainly our supply chain management.

We are looking for improvement in the response time that we get.

In addition, we are not getting regular updates in terms of their patches. Many times, we log a SR and then we get a response from Oracle that they need to apply a patch. Thus, if they can inform us ahead of time for such issues, it will really help.

I have been using this product for more than 10 years.

It's quite stable. We have had no downtime. It's working fine. It's quite stable for us.

We are looking for more scalability. It should be more scalable.

The support at Oracle is good. It's not very good but good.

The Oracle support is through the Oracle MetaLink, where you open up the Oracle SR and then get the support needed. For this, we spend at least a day or two to provide them with information and it is time consuming. Hence, I think it's good.

However, in case of any urgency, we need to go with the escalation route to get the support that is needed and need to go over the issue with them. We need to struggle in terms of getting the right support. They have support in both the US and Indian time zones. Sometimes, we don't get the right support person in the Oracle SR call and that is also one of the struggles that we have with Oracle.

It is straightforward and quite good. In the Oracle application, we don't have an issue with that.

We are looking for reliability whilst selecting a vendor. They should be more knowledgeable in the supply chain area. They should have proper knowledge in the domain area and that's what we look for.

Oracle gives you the capability to do anything you need to do in multiple ways. There are different avenues to achieve the same result, and you can pick the one that best fits your company’s policies and procedures.

It's an end-to-end ERP solution. From a work order to financial reporting, everything is captured within one system. It's a single point of data entry, so once you enter data into the system, it flows all the way downstream.

One of the benefits is also one of the pitfalls. Sometimes users are overwhelmed by the multiple ways in which you can operate. They don't want all of that flexibility.

We're hosted, which adds a level of complexity. The system overall is stable, but our hosting partner is not the best.

We haven’t had any scalability problems. We have both small and large groups using it, and we are continuing to role it out to other organizations within the company.

We have two levels of support. My team is an internal support organization. Then, if need be, we have external support. With external support, you roll the dice. Some issues get resolved relatively quickly, while others drag on. It depends on the person working it.

Since we are hosted, we can’t do rollouts ourselves. We have to schedule them. A lot of our issues have been with our patching, since our hosting partner always seems to break something, which is frustrating. If we had the product all in-house there would be no issues. It’s relatively straightforward to set up.

Make sure that you understand the integration points between the different applications that you’re utilizing. You could make some major mistakes in setting it up. I would rate the product a nine out of ten. We’re pretty happy overall.