Oracle Hyperion

Consolidation of multiple GLs in the Close process

Budgeting in multiple ways(zero based, driver based, strategic long term planning)

providing detailed task lists to help new planners be successful without a lot of training

ability to plan in web based forms or within the same form in excel

users most likely can not create a system themselves, it requires knowledgeable consultants to help get the most out of the system

Some users get frustrated because unlike excel based planning, there is structure and controls built in.

Consolidation engine is superb

User experience is great, web based

Easy to learn and grasp new application

None that I can think of

It was easy to consolidate financial data from multiple domestic and foreign offices.

Training other colleagues in other offices for using the software was easy.

We could easily send the consolidated financial data to our C-suite executives and it looked really readable for them to understand the data.

If there are ways to transfer data into the Hyperion software from other software applications (MS Excel) that would be ideal.

It would be wonderful if data from Hyperion could be downloaded directly into an attachment which can be emailed to other financial colleagues.

It would be great to be able to toggle between various currencies to make it easier for financial staff to understand the impact that some management decisions would make.

HFM is very powerful for financial consolidations .

Hyperion Planning is used to project accurate planning and thus provide the benefit to organization to do allocations and driver based planning so that it can justify the numbers based on headcount, number of stops & Revenue and thus provide valuable projections and thus help reduce the expenses.

Essbase is powerful engine helps provide analytical adhoc reporting for financial users . Performance of reporting and ease of use helps excellent customers experience when doing adhoc analysis.

Visual graphical reporting

Ability for 3rd party reporting tools connecting to Essbase database

get rid of complexity of having different components involved in Hyperion workspace environment connected to different suite of products involved in multiple components

Ease of modification of setting point of views.

Export in query mode is efficient.

Has information for all the cost centers and access to them is simple and straightforward.

Sometimes invalid POV's are hard to determine, so maybe include which one produces an error.

Workspace Hyperion can get a bit slow.

I'm a newer user and still in the process of coming across potential issues.

It is a great planning tool for a complex organization across various levels, such as company and division level, to ensure the integrity of information fed into the system.

It is a great tool for analyzing, dissecting and slicing/dicing the information across multiple dimensions such as accounts, periods, scenarios, etc.

Consolidation across the board for the same group of entities with dynamic features of pre and post-elimination, currency translations, etc. can be achieved successfully using Hyperion.

The myriad of components of Oracle Hyperion is very powerful for each specific purpose and bring to the table a lot of functionality that can otherwise be difficult to achieve. However, this also results in high complexity of the system (an unavoidable consequence).

Data extracts are necessary at various levels from multiple systems on a regular basis to ensure an accurate reflection of information across the board. This, again, is the inherent design but can cause multiple points of failure in case of any issues with the extracts.

The upkeep and infrastructure requirements with regular patch upgrades and server-level upgrades can result in unforeseen situations at times, resulting in high visibility and urgent resolution needs for any such occurrences. The troubleshooting of these once in a while occurrences can turn out to be quite cumbersome.

Oracle Hyperion is great for making monthly or yearly financial planning

It's great for analyzing different types of financial data

Ad-hoc reports can be created easily

Hyperion is difficult to update and maintain

Training for how to use Hyperion is difficult

It is not a mobile application that can be used anytime anywhere

Configuring for an user can be difficult

Very easy to use interactive GUI system, but also has powerful underlying ability to code as complex as necessary.

Easy mass distribution/access for multiple end users.

Expense is the number one concern.

It gives you the ability to look at your dataset in a multidimensional way.

You can create ad-hoc reporting using smart view on top of the Essbase cube.

It gives you the ability to manage multiple dimensions in one centralized place using DRM.

Simplifies the close process with HFM.

Interfacing with in its own tool sets. I believe that applications should seamlessly talk to one another.

Built-in validations that are commonly used should come with the applications.

Take away the templates that come with DRM. They are no good.

Global financial consolidation and reporting for management

Global treasury exposure reporting for hedging and currency exposure reviews

Legal consolidation

Manufacturing plants consolidation and reporting

Focus on mobility aspects for reporting

Ease of loading journal entries

Enhancements around smart view for reporting

Oracle Hyperion is a good tool for centrally analyzing different types of financial data.

Oracle Hyperion Essbase is a great tool for analyzing large amounts of financial data that would other wise be done in spreadsheets manually.

Oracle Hyperion Planning is used by our plants for yearly financial planning.

Oracle Hyperion HFM is very useful for monthly, quarterly and yearly company financial closings.

Oracle Hyperion requires a lot of knowledge and expertise to be successful.

The underlying infrastructure of Oracle Hyperion is complex and can be difficult to implement.

Some of the Oracle Hyperion application servers only run on Windows. Windows can sometimes be unstable.

Oracle Hyperion application server processes are dependent on each other and need to be started in a specific order. Therefore, if certain services die on one server, it could require all services/processes in the entire Hyperion landscape to be restarted in the correct order.

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.

When you have a large number of intersections in a single form, it can take awhile to load.

Additional complexity can add significantly to calc script run times.

There is a learning curve to being a Hyperion and/or Essbase administrator that can be steep depending on the person's skill set and experience. It is not a simple product, but that is what gives it so much power as well.

The reporting aspect of this tool works really well. The tool can easily determine the subset of data from a financial perspective since it integrates with Oracle General Ledger seamlessly.

Easily generate on-the-fly financial close numbers (we did not use these numbers as our actual reports, but used them for a quick insight as to where we were at.)

The crystal ball tool is pretty interesting, and our team has really enjoyed utilizing some of the predictive risk assessments that it has given us.

The tool overall is great, but when you take an EPM system and try and add that many features, they sometimes have bugs and lack the user experience. Some of the tools are hard to work through, and you have to really know the product (Crystal Ball for example.)

There are sometimes issues with the data flow coming through on the reports.

There should be more focus on improving specific tools like the Oracle Performance Scorecard

The web access for the application is really good. you can access trough any web browser to your scenarios.

The native integration with smart view for MS Excel is excellent. A really nice tool for reporting.

the approval procedures and the user security functionality is pretty nice.

Sometimes the error handling is not the best it could be. Some more error detail could come handy sometimes.

Although it has a very user friendly interface, the technical aspects (such as configuration and management) can improve a bit.

The product is a little bit expensive.

Integrates with other Oracle products.

Connects information well, so you can quickly and accurately model, plan and report.

From a functional standpoint, the product performs fairly well.

A high priced solution.

Timely integration process and deployment.

The overall implementation was okay, however, the post implementation support team needed more knowledge.

Transmission of forecasting budgeting data

Group Consolidations

Tracking changes and version controls

Flexibility between Excel and Web based entry

Stability of excel add-in - called SmartView

Better sync between web based and Excel based data review

Stock analytical tools available to use

Custom reporting build capability

Consolidate account balance sheets in a single currency, from companies that work and report in different currencies (for us, Argentinian Peso, Brazilian Real and Uruguayan Peso).

Develop several reports or graphics to cope with needs at very different levels: operational, management, investors.

Create and identify the adjustments made to take the information from our local GAP to IFRS (or eventually US Gap if it were necessary).

Ease to feed the system from different sources, which gives a company the possibility to consolidate data from different ERPs or even Excel.

Perhaps one point can be the graphics capacities with HFM. Graphics are better for Planning, but that can be obey to the fact that we’re running a newer release for Planning.

Planning and managing costs related to the close process

Visibility into financial consolidation

Improving the accuracy of overall reporting

Slight performance issues

More fluid pages and interfaces

Improvements to 'dashboards'

Works well with all of our Excel add-in tools

Nightly calculations run fast so that the environment is ready for reporting in the morning

Great support for all of our needs

Cumbersome development cycles

Doesn't play nice with our ETL tools

Extremely costly consultant support

Reconciliation of accounts

Finance data management

Reporting and analysis is not too good

Ability to sync with all different new databases and big databases should be improved

Very robust allowing you to cut the data in many ways

Goes hand in hand with Oracle EBS

Common EPM tool so easily able to recruit people with experience using it

Depending on the configuration, it is fairly straight forward to use

Integration with excel provides flexibility and automation potential (vs form base)

SmartView.bas (VBA object file) is fairly easy to learn and use, and allows automation of the tool through VBA programming.

SmartView add-in interface can be buggy at times

Generally it takes a lot of steps and time to data entry or update the forms

Too many versions, builds of the SmartView tool to keep track of and ensure you are running the right version

Support/help documents not helpful

Oracle Hyperion EPM helps in handling complex financial calculations related to costing & aging with ease.

You can always write new rules for handling the data the way you need it. Consolidating data at various levels can be easily handed through EPM.

Smart View Integration with Excel, helps in providing the financial information to key users, who after data arrangement produce the same to management for decision making.

The interface for designing the report is not as easy for a layman. The system doesn't allow major changes in the report once it is built which is quite a problem with the suite.

Emailing reports is one drawback with many limitations. There is a limit of around 250 characters for the body of the email. Also there is a limit on the number of characters that are allowed in the to and cc boxes.

There is some need of specialized knowledge of the hyperion product for the end user to start working over it.

HFM will handle complex calculation and consolidation rules extremely well. It's flexibility for writing new rules is unmatched in other products I have seen--the world is quite literally your oyster with this product. You will not come away saying "I wish we could get it to do_______" because it seems there is always a way!

The Smart View tool is how most of our users interact with HFM, and obviously the only way they interact with Essbase. It is a very good tool, and speed of Essbase queries is always strikingly fast. The HFM queries are slower, but that is due to the underlying structure of the database being much different than Essbase. Basically all of our reporting is done in Excel using the Smart View add-in.

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.