Oracle's Corporate Performance Management suite was acquired from Hyperion in 2007. Hyperion customers are encouraged to migrate to Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM.
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ReconNET by Trintech
Score 10.0 out of 10
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ReconNET is a corporate performance management solution from Trintech. ReconNET automates account reconciliation, including high-volume reconciliation, with the goal of helping users tighten controls, reduce risk and increase process efficiency.
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.
It is well suited in scenarios where customers have tremendous volumes of data to deal with and where the reconciliation of the information is of paramount importance to businesses and stakeholders. We use it primarily for balance sheet reconciliations that come with features, such as exception management, which is great for focusing on the few that matter the most at the end of the day.
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.
The ReconNET tool has a great audit-trial system that captures every detail in the life of a record and helps eliminate any manual intervention. It's fully SOX Compliant, and helps track any changes in the data from an audit perspective.
The automation helps us focus entirely on the exceptions, which helps eliminate attention from the mundane tasks to areas with potential problems.
Exception management and automated posting to the GL are great features that help streamline many of the routine, mundane, and yet time-consuming activities, freeing up time to focus on issues at hand.
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.
It takes a little bit of practice to get the hang of the tool to set up the reconciliations, but its not necessarily a drawback, since this applies to every other automation tool out there. However, once someone gets the hang of it, it's pretty user-friendly to run it on a daily basis.
Since automatons can only be built on a set logic, at times certain items that show up as exceptions are not truly a cause of concern. However, since it's always better to flag too many potential exceptions than too few, it's not a true drawback.
It has quite a few features, such as multi-currency reconciliation, bank deposits, disbursements, automated postings to G/L, etc. which could be of great value for various requirements for clients. It is especially useful where volumes of data are too large to deal with. The uses might not be phenomenal for low volume reconciliation requirements.
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.
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 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.
Each automation tool has its own set of features, but the fact that ReconNET is built for reconciliation purposes sets it apart from the rest. The ease of usage once the user gets a hang of it, the extensive audit trial, and the ability to focus on exceptions rather than the necessity to scroll through a bulk of irrelevant information, all provide the key-user with the critical decision-making ability.
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.
It definitely has a positive impact on ROI with freeing up resource availability and usage on the most pressing tasks at hand. For example, focusing on exceptions rather than reconciling from scratch.
Another positive impact on the ROI can be realized with the detailed audit trials on sensitive information.
Strong Financial Reporting is the backbone of any industry, regardless of the sector it operates in, and having an automated reconciliation tool such as ReconNET helps you attain the key objective of integrity of information in a timely fashion, to support the close process.
