IBM Maximo Application Suite is an enterprise asset management (EAM) platform.
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Oracle Fusion Service
Score 6.9 out of 10
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Oracle Service Cloud is the help desk and customer experience management platform from Oracle. The technology was developed and supported by RightNow Technologies as RightNow CX for cloud-based call center automation, until that company's acquisition by Oracle in 2011 for about $1.5 billion.
IBM Maximo Application Suite is well suited for organizations looking for an application to track their end-to-end procurement and supply chain process. It can also be used for billing services, but that would mainly be for services provided as part of a work order, not voluminous customer billing. IBM Maximo Application Suite allows us to have one application where someone from procurement can input contracts and details, someone from any various department can create a requisition and superiors can use automated workflow to approve a purchase order, and someone at an operations location can receive and store materials. Subsequently, someone in the field can submit their hours and material used and it be approved via automated workflow for an invoice to be created. Payment functionality is possible, but we did not implement this aspect of IBM Maximo Application Suite. To note, throughout the process, interfacing can be set up to send transactions to your general ledger. As far as interfacing, IBM Maximo Application Suite also offers tools and configuration to set up endpoints. We have been able to set up REST APIs and request/responses without heavy involvement from developers. This is a nice bonus if integrating with multiple applications.
Oracle Service [(formerly Oracle Service Cloud)] is well suited for cross-channel contact center service which includes live chats, virtual assistants, email support and case management. It has a social tool that keeps tabs on your customer interactions within your social media platforms and your website. You can provide your customers with a knowledge base for self-service with information that they need by posting content and resources.
Delivers Out-of-Box solutions for various industries without the need for customization and configuration
Modules and Applications are well developed and linked in an orderly way, with proper documentation and help guides that allow end users to start using the system with ease
Powerful Work Management, Contracts, Inventory, and Purchasing applications and features that are a better match to other ERP applications today
Oracle Service cloud handles incident management extremely well. It can accept requests from multiple channels. That includes email, website, phone, chat, SMS & some social.
Oracle Service cloud provides a knowledge base that can be used by customers or by agents. It can move consumers to self service for most issues. It also has good feedback from customers and agents so that the knowledge can continue to be updated to push people to more self service.
Oracle has a good consumer portal that can be used as a website or typically is used in conjunction with a main website as a contact center or help center site. This allows the contact center to manage both the knowledge and the request and the interactions with the customers.
Oracle Service cloud is built to provide a turn key solution for CRM/Contact center with some minor configuration. But it also has the ability to be highly customized to meet any companies needs. Much of that work can be done via the configuration options already in the system. It also have a full set of SOAP and Rest APIs for integrating to other systems.
Hard to implement. A high number of resources and manpower is necessary to implement and upgrade IBM Maximo due to its robustness and number of functionalities.
Version fragmentation. Due to the challenge imposed by a version upgrade, it is common to find systems relying on legacy versions of Maximo which might become a challenge for the support team.
Unfriendly UI. The excess of functionalities and services available might become a challenge for a starting user. Although it is possible to customize the UI to fit the exact needs of each user, it is important to map exactly what each user needs.
This is only an occasional, user problem; when searching for specific records, at times we receive an error that the maximum size has been exceeded and therefore does not yield any results. This is particularly frustrating when trying to search for a specific street address across several years.
The versatility, strength, and value that IBM Maximo adds to our company's asset management procedures. The platform has greatly increased operational efficiency and asset performance by streamlining jobs, automating procedures, and offering customizable solutions. Furthermore, IBM's constant assistance and updates have been crucial in meeting changing company requirements. Though there's always potential for improvement.
Although RightNow is extremely flexible, the flexibility comes with a price. It is often not intuitive which settings you need to change (and under which menus these setting are buried) to enable the system to do what you want. Also, sometimes the system can do things you need, but you don't initially realize it. When RightNow sells a system to a new customer, I think it should come with X hours of consulting time with a RightNow expert. The customer should be able to consult with this expert over the next year to get advice concerning how to configure the system to achieve desired needs. Often RightNow Support would just answer "no" when I asked if I could do something, but then I would find another way to achieve my goals after talking with other companies using RightNow.
The gui screens in IBM Maximo Application Suite are not overly cluttered with options to click and navigate to new areas. That is, the display is more of a layout of fields that the user can either input data or just interpret what is on the screen. For those in IT, there is even a feature (press Alt+F1) that will show you the exact table and column of any field selected.
The learning curve is fairly steep; but for something that has this much capability, it's nearly impossible to make it "easy". The layout and organization are at least reasonably intuitive. The hardest part-- the "weakest link"-- is the portal development (where you can build help centers and other end-user pages.) The capabilities there are significant, but the learning curve for that part is especially steep and it takes a fair amount of expertise to be able to update it.
We use a lot of tabs and fields on our incident workspace, which should slow the system down, but it's still quite fast, and we continue to optimize whatever is possible.
I have regularly contacted IBM Support to report issues and raise requests for issues we face during project implementations. The response from them has overall been good and to the point, and they get back to us within a day or 2 and guide us through the process of fixing it or providing an interim fix of the product
The vendor offers customer support to users who maybe stuck in usage of the platform in a number of options and this ensures that one does not get frustrated at all in using the platform. This enhances the trust held by the clients concerning Oracle CX Service [(formerly Oracle Service Cloud)].
Most of our training was given while doing user acceptance testing, and getting the system approved by the market. When ever we were in doubt, our implementer helped us along. Later on we started exploring by our selves.
Work with a RightNow expert during the implementation. Explain features that would you like to have. Often, somebody who really knows the system can show you what you need to do to achieve the desired results. Where a RightNow support engineer or a consultant might say "the system can't do that," a RightNow application engineer will listen to what you need, and often come up with an alternate path to achieve it
As a computerized maintenance management system i do not have experience of any other system. The only experience I have is for Maximo and it works excellent for me. I am using many modules available in Maximo and all of these modules are almost fulfilling all of my business needs.
TCS' customers who also selected Oracle Service Cloud over Salesforce Service Cloud and GE's ServiceMax in the Mfg. vertical in which I work, did so because of the robust ability of Oracle Service Cloud and its APIs to integrate with other value-add solutions for manufacturers such as IoT applications, Big Data Analytics, and Field Service applications.
We have an internal chargeback for servers and we anticipate that the cloud will save us some money or be cost neutral for us.
We plan to see a reduction in the need for data center staff and server provisioning as we move more environments to the cloud.
We are now responsible for our own destiny with the ability to ramp up and down our servers based on need. We can also monitor our costs more closely with the metered service and turn off the environments when we are not using them.
