Oracle Hyperion vs. SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)

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.

Incentivized

SAP BPC is well suited for complex planning and consolidations needs where the underlying transactional system is SAP ECC. It suits well if the organization has separate teams with BPC, ABAP, BW, Basis, Hana skillset. SAP BPC is less appropriate for organizations using Agile methodology. It is not suitable for organizations in a hyper-growth cycle as the installation and implementation is time-consuming. It will not work for organizations where the planning and budgeting needs keep changing frequently. The UI of SAP BPC is not very intuitive and very difficult to set up a dynamic dashboard for senior executives and officials of CxO.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• SAP BPC is real time data. You can send information into the system and see it reflected in your reports immediately. Other systems may require a manual push into a reporting system.
• SAP BPC is a shared reporting tool, so multiple users can be working in a model/environment at the same time, real time. This is especially helpful if your workbooks incorporated multiple processes requiring multiple users to get into the same model.
• SAP BPC is a powerful tool designed to help all facets of the company, from cash flow to capital expenditures to headcount management to financial planning to consolidation.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Being from a law firm, the system needed a lot of custom tailoring in order to fit our full needs (although many companies could say the same thing). Although the ability to highly customize the system to the company's needs is a positive, it frequently results in the system responding in unexplainable and unrepeatable ways which negatively impacts and slows the budget process. Because of the sporadic nature and variety of the issues, we are unable to repeat them on cue and therefore cannot nail down a solution.

Incentivized

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.

Unlike other SAP traditional products, SAP BPC was meant to be simple and familiar to financial users

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We need a big support team with various skillset like BPC, ABAP, BW, HANA, FICO etc

Incentivized

SAP BPC training content and trainers are very good. The training is structured and provides a very good understanding of the product features and functionalities. I attended 6 separate training sessions of week-long or more. I had very good experience in all the sessions. The training is organized very well.

Incentivized

SAP Training contents are very good, informative and exhaustive.

Incentivized

The implementation was carried out in two phases spread over a period of 4 years with 2 upgrades in between. We also had multiple upgrades to HANA.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

With Hyperion we struggled as it didn’t have integrated planning and consolidation, whereas BPC does have it. BPC is easier for reporting as it is Excel-based. Also BPC has prepackaged business process flows that helped a lot. Hyperion on the other hand has a faster response time for user queries or report generation.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Office administrators are able to enter data directly, freeing up accounting staff.
• Dependent expenses such as taxes and benefits are automatically calculated, saving time for accounting staff.
• Single source of data for budget information ensures consistency of information when reporting to senior management.

Incentivized