BQE CORE vs. Oracle Cloud EPM

CORE is well suited for time entry and reporting across employee groups and projects. CORE can generate many useful reports, however the customization and filtering of these reports isn't exactly intuitive. It can be difficult to get the reports to show the data you want, and there is no way to remove data fields from a report or create a custom report.

Incentivized

It is well suited in a geographically distributed environment where you have various key participants in multiple time zones providing input and necessary explanations on performance and measured success It is less appropriate where you have a single office environment with a single finance department working together. It is also less suited when the GL is NOT an Oracle product and the interface between the GL and the reporting software needs to be implemented with utmost care and handling.

Incentivized

• Invoice Collections within Billing is a great tool because of the ability to take notes and track contact.
• Invoices are professional looking and easy for our clients to understand the overall progress within each phase of their project.
• Dashboards are the best tool EVER!
• The Contact List feature within Clients setup is the perfect way to track multiple project managers within a large company that also has multiple contracts with us.

Incentivized

• Account Reconciliation CLoud Services provides tight integration with Oracle R12 and 11i . Provides drillback capability. It is flexible and provides rich functionality to users.
• We have implemented ARCS on cloud and migrated planning and budgeting from On premise to PBCS and EPBCS. Functionality is onpar with onpremise. Provides regular updates monthly
• We don't need to upgrades every year and saved a lot on Hardware.

Incentivized

• Startup training is available (& you need it so that you get off to a great start)
• A report that shows the key setups for a project that can be glanced over quickly to assure it is correct
• A way to set a new start date for the dashboards and data set, or a way to default old bad data to a default so reports run without bad data showing up.

• The limitation of constrained out of the box dimensions that requires ripping the initial implementation to add the new dimensions is a major drawback.
• Smartview interface is cumbersome for many.
• The only financial adapter is available for integration for other modules we have to go with file-based uploads which is cumbersome and not real-time.
• It is very costly in terms of licensing unlike other Oracle products.

Incentivized

We have been using Core for a few years now, and honestly started to look at other software systems to see what was out there. What we chose was a nightmare for migration so we never left Core. Now we have added invoicing and payments from Core instead of double entry with QBO. Still only a few cycles in but looks like it will be up to speed soon and working smoothly.

Incentivized

We have a pretty good userbase who are at the high level who gained value from this tool. Discontinuing this tool is prone to impact their day to day operations. Also the data in this tool cannot alter the source, which maintains the integrity of this tool. Smartview is a cool addition that gained lot of traction as well.

Incentivized

It's very easy to use and straightforward. Everything is laid out in an easy to use pattern and can be changed, somewhat, based on user preference. The options are limited but it's a pleasant experience using the product and I can perform the tasks I need to perform quickly and without any issues.

Incentivized

EPM usability is good in some modules but needs some improvement in others

Incentivized

I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.

EPM has been so far available all the time

Incentivized

This is one area that does need some improvement. It can be slow at time, so we had our IT look at it from our side and we had no issues, so it has to be some slowness on their side.

The product performance is so far very good

Incentivized

Our team has had to contact support on a number of occasions, mostly to address a slow system and/or not being able to log in. The support is very responsive and fixes the issue within the same day. Additionally, any time we need to modify codes, BQE helps with that support and gets it turned around quickly.

Incentivized

Support from our implementation partner is a 10/10, but support from Oracle is awful. Case in point: recently over a 2-day period, there were a series of intermittent outages. Oracle actually asked US for the outage time-stamps. I would have thought that, since we were paying them, they should probably be able to tell us!

Incentivized

Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.

It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.

Incentivized

I suggest doubling the time to implement from the initial quote you get from the Sales team. That's always been the case for me for multiple EPMs now. The out-of-the-box functionality of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud is pretty robust so I appreciate that and it really helped us get the ball rolling quickly.

Incentivized

I am a user and was not involved in the decision making. Tool was already in place when I joined. But comparing to other tools I have used in the past, BQE is by far the easiest to use. You do not need any training to start using this tool immediately

Incentivized

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud fared very well against Adaptive, Anaplan, and Host Analytics. We ultimately decided on Oracle due to its reputation and strength of existing customers. We are happy with our decision.

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

The product is scalable

Incentivized

• BQE Core has allowed our growing business to manage time tracking in an effective and efficient manner. We could not have effectively kept running our operation without it.
• BQE Core provides all of the reports we need to do our monthly management reporting. This allows us to quickly spot problems such as capacity overloads, receivables problems, budget overruns, or timekeeping issues.
• BQE Core has supported our business objective of generating more profit from projects that we undertake by allowing us to quickly and effectively monitor budget burn rates before it becomes an issue.

Incentivized

• Significantly reduced the amount of money we spent for the maintenance of in-house hardware.
• We now need less employees to manage the configurations of Oracle EPM Cloud.
• There have been many time savings as a whole to apply to more productive causes.

Incentivized