Alteryx Platform vs. Oracle Hyperion (legacy)

I would 100% recommend Alteryx to a friend, for me its friendly interface is the best, it has all the tools I need without the headache that programming is. It can be used for simple or complex analysis, so honestly, I don’t see a scenario where it wouldn’t suit. I’ve used Alteryx to make simple things I could do in Excel, for example, but it was less complex and faster to do in Alteryx, so why not? Its a very versatile tool.

Incentivized

Well suited: For use in multiple offices around the world. I was able to obtain financial reporting data from 5 foreign offices and then consolidate their data with 3 domestic USA offices to prepare a consolidated financial statement. Less Appropriate: Translating the financial value for consulting services could be a bit challenging because that required human interaction and judgement. It would have been great to be able to set up some software to be able to interpret this and let it run for all future project work revenue projection.

Incentivized

• Pulling data from multiple disparate data sources.
• Allows users to see the data at every step of the workflow to be able to cleanse, analyze, and optimize the data.
• Provides an analytics platform that is easy for users of all levels to thrive in whether they are just starting out in their analytics journey or they have a master's degree in Data Science.

• This product handles budgeting by Employee and/or Position very well. It is highly flexible and allows Hyperion administrators the ability to develop a planning application that fits a variety of different business needs.
• It is great at calculating benefits using business rules to automate the population of these fringe costs in the overall budget planning process. This greatly reduces user error.
• It allows you to seed the operating budget based on changes to key drivers, such as percentage increases, flat dollar increases and more detailed changes using business rules.
• Allows visibility into the plans for each unit across the organization, rolled up into an overall budget for the campus.
• It handles the creation of budgets with multiple chartfield segments or dimensions, which most other budgeting systems cannot handle well. It can aggregate these very quickly.

Incentivized

• Steeper Learning Curve: Alteryx can have a steep learning curve for users who are new to the platform or have limited experience with data analytics. Enhancements to the user interface and user onboarding resources could help make the learning process more intuitive and accessible to a wider range of users.
• Enhanced Data Visualization Capabilities: Alteryx offers basic data visualization capabilities, but there is room for improvement in terms of advanced visualizations and interactive dashboarding features. Adding more sophisticated chart types, interactive widgets, and customization options would enhance the data visualization capabilities within the platform.
• Improved Error Handling and Debugging: Alteryx provides error handling mechanisms, but enhancing the error reporting and debugging capabilities would be beneficial. Improved error messages, better visibility into data flow, and debugging tools could help users troubleshoot and resolve issues more efficiently.

Incentivized

• One pain point for us is the consolidation and translation process. Needing to translate the data over and over again is frustrating and there is no visibility into how many users are running a translation. If multiple users attempt to translate the same data set, say goodbye to your performance but you have no way of knowing! (Unless you want to pull up a task audit which is not a very realistic expectation). It has the been the quickest way for us to bring the system to it's knees. The consolidation process performs in direct correlation to the complexity of the calculation/consolidation rules. So, while the product is extremely flexible, you still have to be careful how you design your rules and calculations to make sure that you do it on the smallest subset of data as possible to avoid large processing times. This makes sense, but requires some significant expertise that most organizations do not have in-house.
• The Hyperion Financial Reporting product is ridiculously outdated and clunky to use. The interface for designing reports is not intuitive, and not easy to modify once a report is built. I think there must be a strategic decision to move away from it and go to something more like Oracle BI because I just can't understand why in the world they don't update the reporting product. It also requires a significant level of expertise to be able to use. Not a great solution at all if you want multiple end-users to create reports in something other than Excel. Nobody except the HFM admin (which I used to be) in our company even touches this module.
• Another pain point is the amount of IT support that is required to run this thing, and again, specialized knowledge of Hyperion products and how they work is required for IT to adequately support it. This goes for application servers and the Oracle database that the applications are running on.

We've developed a working partnership with Alteryx. As an enablement suite, we're continuing to innovate and deliver great products with use of Alteryx in our solutions. Alteryx use expands to our global product development teams and is in use in multiple parts of our organization. Alteryx also delivers Experian demographic content to other clients in their product offering. We're highly likely to renew, but that decision is way above my pay grade.

We're in the middle of the road because we are not sure that other products on the market fit the bill for what we need yet. Hyperion is expensive and burdensome from an administrator and maintenance standpoint, but it still seems to be the best solution for what we need. Show us an equally capable SaaS consolidation product and we'll talk again.

I've found that while some things might take a little longer to create, the flexibility of Alteryx allows you to perform any function needed. I haven't found a use that was not available in Alteryx yet. APIs and XMLs can be created to perform certain functions. In addition, CMD line commands can be sent using Alteryx to perform certain functions as well.

Incentivized

I use many programs and compared to others, Alteryx virtually never goes down, freezes up or gives an application error. Over a 4 year time period that I have used this program, any of these may have happened 3 times. It is an incredibly stable program that I feel completely confident in.

I already gave the example of journal entries created in less than a second. What else can I tell you about.... I can tell you those 2 journal entries have historically had to be split into separate accounting systems so the outputs had to be very different (D365 vs Intacct) such that they are exactly ready for uploading. I can tell you I used to have some tire and battery queries hitting a line item detail table and they took hours to run UNTIL I asked IT for a view in SQL and now they're ready in about 5 minutes total. I guess I'd say if anything does take a long time - do some research with others and figure out what would speed them up

Incentivized

Stellar, bar-none. Some of the best support folks of any vendor. The Alteryx Community is the most responsive and supportive. On the rare occasion of a release issue or bug, we've been able to get quick help to solve the core problem. Alteryx does not play the blame game. They genuinely help the users solve their issues or respond to questions

Incentivized

The premium support team provides much needed dedicated customer service which we are after for what we have paid for this service. We are satisfied with the service and support and do not have any instance where there was an issue that requires escalation to get the right support team. Though the incidence of major issues that requires the premium support are less, we prefer to keep this as a safety net.

Incentivized

1st level of trainings which I've attended in Paris was easy and I was already knowing %90, that learning could have been an e-learning instead of in-person

Incentivized

Very good, detailed online trainings which you can take at your own pace, and strong certifications exists, certifications are extremely detailed and hard...

Incentivized

There is really not much to it (the installation, that is). Once you get it installed, along with any of the add-ons (demographics, R, etc.), you are up and running almost immediately. There is really no additional setup. You can immediately begin blending data, running demographics, performing spatial queries, running predictive analysis, etc. And for many of these functions, the learning curve is quite easy.

Alteryx is MUCH more user friendly. both provide the ability to code within them, but Alteryx has much nicer interface. The formula tools have a more simple language that is easier to learn than formulae in SSIS. Alteryx is easy to read with multi colored tools identifying what each one does. It also allows for macros. You can build your own tool to process records of data or batch records together.

Incentivized

I use Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Mangement because the company I work at requires me to use it in the Financial Planning sector as most of their data is stored in it. I am open minded and ready to use other performance management tools created by Oracle if my work permits.

Incentivized

Individual analysts can quickly generate results using their own copy of Alteryx Designer. But using the Server and developing macros for more complex needs can be time consuming.

• Error handling - allows controls to be built into workflows easily and allows them to be isolated and spat into control reports that can be easily reviewed and audited, thanks to the ability to create multiple outputs in one go.
• Time-saving - saved huge amounts of time, especially when moving Excel processes into Alteryx.
• Product development - allowed my firm to create products that we have been able to market and sell to clients.

Incentivized

• Oracle Hyperion allows us to automate and consolidate financial data that used to be performed manually in spreadsheets. From that perspective the ROI is huge.
• Oracle Hyperion functionality is extensive and allows us to perform most functions for planning, consolidating and reporting on our financial data.
• One negative with Oracle Hyperion is that it is complicated to implement and maintain. It takes expertise at all levels (infrastructure and management) to realize the benefits from it.

Incentivized