Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (formerly Dynamics NAV) is one of the ERP products in the Dynamics family.
The technology is based on the Navision product acquired by Microsoft in 2002. This product is the best-selling Microsoft ERP platform, and is often used by companies in the manufacturing and distribution verticals.
$8
per month per user
Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Oracle's Corporate Performance Management suite was acquired from Hyperion in 2007. Hyperion customers are encouraged to migrate to Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is well suited for inventory management in all aspects. Its accessibility, along with my other apps, when out of the office is unparalleled. I find it easy to work with on a desktop or laptop; however, it could use some work on a mobile device.
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.
Automate the creation of bills of materials for production. We can now generate a BoM from a sales order.
Organization of all data pertaining to thousands of parts, assemblies, and finished goods. Engineering and purchasing have a common portal.
We can create sales orders from quotations instead of re-entering them (this did require some bolt-on software). Less redundant work with fewer entry errors.
Accounting can provide reports based on specific criteria stored in NAV. We can pull better and more detailed intelligence.
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.
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 already decided to continue using this software. It is too expensive for us to upgrade so we made a workaround by using the virtual computer with Windows XP installed on it. We did research replacing this software, but it was a better financial decision to keep what we had instead
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.
Best in terms of reporting or coming up with a great dashboard. Seamlessly collaborated with teams without depending on particular device as its web version is the buddy for people with work flexibility. Licensing price and integrations can be the areas of improvement and can simplify the interface which will be easy for a new user.
It provides one to efficiently be able to manage bookkeeping and inventory without much challenges. One can easily navigate through workflow processes while managing usages and budgets. Being able to produce reports in Word, Excel or PDF means one is able to have a working document to produce trends and graphs or produce pivot tables.
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.
I have personally supported all of the Dynamic family of ERP systems and made the decision to concentrate on NAV as the solution of choice. From a support and development standpoint there are few if any packages that can compare. It is not uncommon for most of the companies that I support to only call me once or twice a month after the first year. This is due to the ease of tracking down problems and errors and the ability for a developer to provide the end-user with routines that automatically correct the most basic kind of error
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.
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.
