NetSuite ERP vs Oracle Hyperion

• Integration. From Accounting to ERP to CRM, I don't imagine there is much NetSuite can't handle. For a small to medium sized business, and ever for many large organizations, I believe it is entirely possible to put all of the corporate system 'eggs' into one basket - that is on the NetSuite platform.
• Architecture. The back-end database and inner workings of the NetSuite platform, I would describe as 'different.' Not necessarily better and definitely not worse. However, working in the data is different and maybe not as traditional as when working with a traditional relational database. Because of this, it does take a little bit of getting used to. However, once you are 'used to' it - the ease and simplicity of the back end is a beautiful thing and makes extracting and working with data, again once you cross the learning curve, something to be desired. Took me a few months to get the hang of things, but now, I couldn't imagine a more productive system.
• Performance. While not lighting fast compared to some on-premise tools, the performance of the NetSuite platform is better that adequate and is quite useable on a day-to-day basis.
• Consultants. We have had great success working with implementation specialists and consultants directly at Oracle. They are highly knowledgeable and easy to work with. I would highly recommend the native teams for implementation success.

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• 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.

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• NetSuite does have great customization capabilities, however, this can also make it difficult to track and maintain custom workflows and scripts as business needs change, especially with different subsidiaries having different process requirements. Essentially, the more you customize the system, the more you need to maintain documentation for reference.
• NetSuite has a fantastic reporting tool called a "Saved Search." For financial and other similar reports, you must use the NetSuite "Report" feature. This reporting feature is not as flexible as the Saved Search and I have found that certain reports cannot be customized as required using the "Report" feature.
• The Project Management module still has some work to go before it is flexible enough for companies to use NetSuite for their own customized processes. The module is fairly inflexible, and at a previous company we had around 10-15 enhancement requests alone relating to this module.

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• 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.

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