My company uses Oracle WebCenter Content for automating part of our Accounts Payable (AP) processes by ingesting new invoices. The AP department is very happy with the functionality of the OCR (optical character recognition) feature. The product integrates nicely with the Oracle Payables module. The imported invoices can easily be categorized, indexed, etc.
Pros
OCR works very well when scanning invoices.
Integration with other Oracle products works well.
Cons
Some functionality you would expect to be built-in (such as reporting for compliance) is not and requires other Oracle products to be integrated.
Separating an invoice with multiple lines for different departments is not an easy task.
Likelihood to Recommend
If your company is large and uses other Oracle products, Oracle WebCenter Content is probably a worthwhile investment. It integrates well with other Oracle applications and has the potential to help automate some of your existing processes.
If you do not use other Oracle products, I would say there are better alternatives out there that are probably more user-friendly and cost effective.
VU
Verified User
Director in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Oracle WebCenter Content is being used for an AP invoicing solution. It is being used by the AP business team in our organization. It gives a life cycle to our supplier's invoices and gives one repository and source of truth for all supplier invoices and it also provided easy access to the invoices. And to also make sure to prevent duplication and timely payment to the suppliers.
Pros
It provided one single repository with a URL link to access each AP invoice.
It gives a life cycle to each invoice where a business user can perform some additional indexing as per their needs.
It also provides a reporting feature and a front-end for users to view invoices with ease and very helpful for auditing purpose.
It uses the BPEL engine to customize the life cycle and also it can automate the auto entry of supplier invoices in your EBS system.
Reduce a lot of manual efforts, manual errors and workforce.
Cons
The OCR feature needs to be enhanced as currently for automatically creation of invoices, we still need a XML data file.
Likelihood to Recommend
The WebCenter content can be used with all the Oracle modules where documentation is being used.
We implemented Oracle Fusion Payables along with WebCenter content. WebCenter has optical character recognition capability which reduces data entry effort by 80%. Accounts payables invoice processing is a paper-intensive process. We have a shared service center which processes about 1500 invoices a day. We were looking for a scalable solution and Oracle Fusion Payables with WebCenter solved the problem.
WebCenter content can extract index and archive the data. As per regulatory requirements, we are supposed to store all AP invoices for 7 years. We were storing them physically in cabinets in the office. With the current real estate boom, we were spending a significant amount on rentals. With WebCenter Content, these invoices can be stored, indexed and archived in the cloud. This frees up space in our office and saves money. Our auditors also loved this as data is organized in a much better way and it can be easily retrieved with a click of the button.
WebCenter content is an enterprise-class content management system which can securely store any type of documents from any source. Further WebCenter content can be integrated with any major ERP in the market.
Pros
Suppliers emailed scanned invoices to WebCenter as opposed to sending invoices via snail mail, which is paper intensive and slow. This alone reduced our Payables processing cycle time.
WebCenter Content can extract, categorize, index and organize data from invoice images. This reduces 80% of data entry effort. WebCenter Content has optical character recognition capability. It can match the invoice to the purchase order mentioned on the invoice image.
WebCenter content is tightly integrated with Oracle Payables. The scanned invoices can be accessed from payables on demand. Invoice approvers can view the scanned invoice before approving them.
Cons
Any images in the emails sent by suppliers (supplier logos in the signature) are treated as invoices by WebCenter Content software.
We have an invoice with 4 lines and each line has its own project manager. Ideally, each invoice line should be sent for approval to respective project managers. However, WebCenter Business Process management was sending all the lines to all project managers.
The user experience of Oracle WebCenter Content can be drastically improved. It is not up to the mark.
Likelihood to Recommend
WebCenter Content is suitable for payables invoice processing for companies with a huge volume of paper invoices. 80% of data entry effort can be reduced.
For small companies with less volume, WebCenter may not make sense. WebCenter is not perfect. It has some issues. We raised enhancement requests with Oracle, hopefully, Oracle will resolve them soon.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Finance and Accounting (5001-10,000 employees)
This was selected as a solution to be used as the platform for a planned enterprise-wide records management system. An important feature was the the ability to manage both existing paper records, as well as current and future electronic records. The optional RMA records management module offered a Records life-cycle management ability that we did not previously possess.
Pros
Offers a stable Content Management environment with native versioning for use as a collaboration environment.
The optional Inbound Refinery can automatically generate PDF renditions of content files
Records management module meets all of the basic DoD 5015.2 Records Mgmt standards specifications
Standard components can perform additional functions was as Image Processsing, water-marking
Cons
The user interface is very dated, and not really very configurable without custom module development. We are waiting to see what the promised improvements in the UI look like, when they are debuted in the upcoming 12C release of WebCenter
There are really no simple utilities or APIs for transferring content and metadata between WebCenter and any interconnected systems. Any data transfer project -- whether an ad hoc transfer, or an ongoing service -- typically requires some sort of custom Java development
The basic application is very mature, and pretty much bullet-proof. When odd problems or behaviors arise, the Oracle support engineers have a wide range of support experience with the product. Their knowledge levels can vary from expert to essentially no experience with the product. This can lead to lengthy, frustrating support cases, to solve even minor issues
Likelihood to Recommend
If a customer is setting up a system from scratch, can they afford to have a 3rd party integrator come on site to assist with designing, configuring and launching their installation? It might be very difficult to bring a WebCenter system up, without any expert assistance for the launch.
If a potential customer needs to have a great deal of interconnectivity with other enterprise systems, how much custom development support can they muster to support their plans?
I am an enterprise content management consultant. My company designs and builds implementations of content management solutions for public and private sector organizations who need to manage hundreds of thousands upwards to millions of documents for web and non-web use. Oracle WebCenter Content is built on a robust content and document management repository with fully customizable metadata and that scales extremely well. WebCenter Content provides enterprise-wide content management, not just web content management (though it does that too). The system uses web service APIs to allow third-party as well as other Oracle tools to leverage its capabilities so it is highly adaptable to almost any business need.
Pros
WebCenter Content's biggest strength is its robust content repository
WebCenter Content provides SOAP and JSON web service APIs for integration with third-party and custom tools
WebCenter Content has very strong yet flexible access control and security
WebCenter Content has very powerful, customizable workflows to accommodate any organizational authoring, editing, and approval structure
WebCenter Content provides excellent tools for development, staging, and production authoring/developing, testing, and publication
Metadata for content stored and managed in WebCenter Content is fully customizable so custom rules can be created to store, retrieve, and manipulate content individually or in batch.
WebCenter Content is fast and scales very well for optimal performance.
Cons
Better user experience, especially in SiteStudio, the web development IDE.
More modern user interface features such as drag-and-drop web page construction
More modern and visually appealing user interface overall
A full implementation of WebCenter Content as a managed node in the WebLogic application server to leverage all of WebLogic's capabilities
Integration of a web experience/campaign management tool for managing online marketing targeting and personalization
Likelihood to Recommend
For organizations that have a huge number of documents in a variety of formats (MS Word, PDF, text, etc) to manage - and by huge I mean hundreds of thousands or millions, WebCenter Content is a great solution. WebCenter Content is also a great choice if/when an organization has a lot of users with different roles and permissions to be managed. During the selection process the focus should be on how the client actually works. Implementation and development are relatively small parts of the overall life cycle. What is important to ascertain is who will be using the system (authors, administrators, editors, etc), what tasks or objectives do they need to complete, and what the content creation, review, editing, approval, and maintenance process looks like.
