BQE CORE vs. Oracle Siebel CRM

I would recommend this for our industry: architecture, engineering, or construction. I would recommend this for any larger firm with many employees or high number of projects. I would particularly recommend this for a company with projects that have budget constraints and where time tracking and expense tracking is very important. I would not recommend this complicated software for a small firm with a small amount of income or number of projects.

As an end user, I would not recommend this solution for enterprise deployment. Lack of support for modern browsers, slow performance, and poor searchability - these things set Siebel CRM in the rear of the pack. There was no great mobile solution either, so that can be bothersome especially for road warriors like myself.

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

• Great data model: the out of the box version comes with standard objects that support most of the industries business models: Finance, Communications, Utilities, Public Sector, Life Sciences to name a few.
• Ease of implementation: implementation is done by configuring standard objects or creating new objects; additional level of customization via script is also possible.
• Lots of resources available on the product
• Supported by Oracle one of the world leader in IT
• Multiple developers can configure and test concurrently in their own workspace and then merge the result in the main application.

Incentivized

• Customizable Reporting
• Linking Project to Payment all together
• Assigning contacts to particular roles - such as Invoicing, Contracts, etc.
• Accounting Functionality - they are basically a project management accounting software, so in my opinion, they could learn some things from other accounting software such as QuickBooks etc.

Incentivized

• Migrations between environments is one area that could be improved, with tools to compare and move data elements (source vs target).
• Easier ways to identify, through email or a web page, the health of the overall system (components, marketing campaigns, tasks, servers, etc).
• The UI seems to be improved with the newer versions of Siebel, but I believe it requires a lot of new features. It seems that other CRM solutions that are cloud-based are putting a lot of emphasis on the Usability and presentation, things where Siebel may need to catch up...

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

The foundation is awesome, like I have said before, however the house being built on it, the educational resources being provided to us (more of sales pitches that don't work), and flexible workflow opportunities, is making us look elsewhere for how much we will be spending on per user. It's crazy to think how flexible they are not when it comes to user settings. Lack of integration with other sources is awful.

Incentivized

Oracle Siebel CRM is an older Sales CRM, so many of it's features aren't as current as ones used today. However, it has a smoother and easy-to-use UI. We're glad that we can still access Oracle Siebel CRM because it's easier to find older information that we can't easily find in our Salesforce Lightning CRM tool.

Incentivized

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

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.

As a new employee and CORE user, I talk to support on a weekly basis. I have never had to wait for more than 3 min to get connect with a support rep, and all my questions have been answered. The support representatives are polite and eager to help no matter how simple your question is.

Incentivized

We no longer have support for our Oracle Siebel CRM. When we did, the support was slow to get some things fixed, therefore, there was a lot of downtime. Of course, this slowed down our overall productivity and increased our overall frustration with the tool. However, it would be nice if we still had some support with it since we still do access it from time to time.

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

Deltek Vision is far more advanced, more encompassing and offers more flexibility with what you want to do. However, it's also quite difficult to use, whereas BQE CORE is intuitive and user friendly. The trade off is worth it in some arenas but overall it's not suited for a larger fast paced company. Great for smaller companies.

Incentivized

We also connect to Oracle Business Intelligence, which is not even an option of the list of products above (that's always encouraging when products are missing from lists!) This connects to campaigns in Siebel along with users writing reports based on data from Siebel. I don't think OBIEE stacks up that great with other systems because it seems to be lacking in reports, and those who can make them have to be quite technical. Oracle Database I think stacks up because of how robust and speedy (at times) it can be

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

• Quick setup of new tasks under a parent project, with immediate hourly billing to it.
• Monitoring of details of non-chargeable efforts in appropriate detail
• Validation of hourly cost, billing cost, benefit cost, profitability by person and role
• Company tracking of write-off's included in corporate and project reporting, no data is "lost"
• Can track excessive work time as +PTO in lieu of pay for use as future vacation

• This has all my company needs for sales analytic. It has helped our call center and the sales portal become more lean and require less resources for their day-to-day.
• We use its research and direct email capabilities and use it to target specific groups of potential clients. We have seen an improvement of nearly 20%.
• We have clients who have used a few modules like bill summary, campaign management and customer information. Oracle Siebel CRM has helped them reap ROI within a year from going live.