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Very stable platform with a few bugs.
Updated March 12, 2014

Very stable platform with a few bugs.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

R12

Modules Used

  • Order Management, Shipping Execution, Inventory, Purchasing, Costing, Bill of Materials

Overall Satisfaction

  • The various modules in E-Business Suite are seamlessly integrated with one another and provide the industry standard for transactional systems. The fact that such a wide range of different modules is so seamlessly integrated is a huge plus.
  • In addition, the entire stack has great usability and it's not difficult to customize the suite for specific business needs. Customers can expand base functionality through customizations which are relatively easy to develop.
  • The product does well with standard ERP functions like inventory planning, order entry, shipping, purchasing and financials. All of these major business processes have become quite refined over the years and work very well indeed.
  • One other area the product does particularly well is the ability to automate processes and eliminate the need for manual labor like data entry from third party systems, or automation of the purchasing and supply chain planning solutions. Some examples:
  • Design documents: the Agile Product Lifecycle Management module (which was once a separate standalone product) has a very strong adapter to the rest of the suite. Data from this module used to have to be re-keyed into the ERP system but now this is no longer necessary. With Version12, this is easier than ever. The new version had replaced the old character-based forms with web forms which are much easier to integrate with the Agile system.
  • Pricing updates. New pricing schemas used to be re-keyed by hand py product managers. Now, it's relatively simple to write a program that uploads an Excel spreadsheet automatically making manual data entry unnecessary.
  • Inventory management: When inventory levels fall below a pre-set level, the system automatically creates a new purchase order during the night and notifies inventory managers in the morning.
  • The suite has been around for quite a while at this stage and it is now a very stable platform. Many of the kinks and bugs have long ago been fixed and the platform really is rock solid.
  • This depends on how the application has been deployed, but some modules or functionality like E-Business Tax may not be helpful for companies that are not operating in Europe or globally.
  • Also, some modules like advanced supply chain planning might be overwhelming for companies that have far fewer products to sell. It's important to understand what modules are needed to support specific business processes. This is not always easy to tell.
  • The sales module is not great - obviously the key vendor in this area is Salesforce. Many Oracle customers tend to use Salesforce for Sales and Marketing, or else develop their own modules leveraging the extensive and easy-to-use customization capabilities of the E-Business suite suite. Oracle has been working hard to develop the Siebel platform as a credible competitor to Salesforce, but many Oracle customers (like us) have already deployed Salesforce as the industry leading Sales CRM and are very unlikely to switch at this point. Integration between the two products is quite straightforward and the switching costs are high so there is very little incentive to switch.
  • ROI period is about 1 to 2 years depending on the various modules being used and the number of customizations.
Today, E-Business Suite is probably the industry leading transactional ERP package, and my expectations are that it will only get better over time with standardized solutions becoming available in future releases. This product is relatively easy to upgrade and use. It manages all of our core processes with ease.
Oracle E-Business Suite applications help customers manage the
complexities of global business environments regardless of whether the
organization is small, medium, or large in size. Oracle application modules seamlessly integrate with each other and, based on needs, customers can choose to implement the modules they need for their business. Oracle E-Business Suite applications will continue to be enhanced against industry standard processes that eliminate the need for customizations hence making the upgrades less time-consuming and increasing ROI.

Product Usage

500 - Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Order Management, Supply Chain, Financials and Service.
10 - Business analysts and developers.
  • Oracle E-Business Suite is a transactional system for businesses, and comprises of a complete collection of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply-chain management (SCM) computer applications. We use the complete set of suite functionality to manage all our major business processes.
  • The product utilizes Oracle's core Oracle relational database management system technology.
  • For us, the suite provides solutions for key business processes like:
  • Design to Release: This is where product design documents are created and managed in the Agile Product Lifecycle Management module before they are imported into the Oracle E-Business suite once they have been manufactured and are ready to sell.
  • Order to Cash: This is where customer orders are managed all the way through from initial order to shipping and billing. This process relies on the SCM module and is tightly integrated with G/L and Financials so that sales are correctly recorded.
  • Procure to Pay: This process is where we manage the procurement process from order to payment. Once again, the process is tightly integrated with Financials.
  • In prior release of Oracle eBusiness Suite, the ability to customize or develop innovative processes that were missing for the tax management in eBusiness Suite had helped the business entities with global footprint to develop in-house processes for global tax management that allowed the companies to save millions of dollars in operating expenses, and took advantage of the tax incentives that are provided by various Countries the companies have established their businesses in. In the latest release of Oracle eBusiness Suite, Oracle provides a powerful, consolidated approach to managing indirect taxes through Oracle E-Business Tax with a rich interface to third-party tax engines.This unified design enables companies to control and consistently manage global sales, use, and value-added taxes across all Oracle E-Business Suite applications.
  • Oracle eBusiness Suite provides an advanced planning solution module, and for companies with multiple manufacturing sites or distributions across various global sites it helped planners to manage the inventory levels effectively and has the ability to view inventory levels at various inventory locations, and implemented lean manufacturing techniques, improved efficiency in manufacturing and turnaround for finished goods. The ability to customize within the eBusiness Suite had helped the Companies to develop innovative solutions to integrate fulfillment processes with local carriers and Customs, and provided the solution to print localized shipping documents, and helped reduce the delivery lead times to the Customers and save on transportion costs.

Evaluation and Selection

Oracle E-Business Suite versions 11.5.9, 11.5.10

Implementation

The key success factors for the implementation was project management, in-house expertise in IT and time.

The implementation process started with the initial evaluation with the initial upgrade on a test system and mapping out the gaps and requirements. We did work with Oracle to understand the new functionality R12 had to offer and did another upgrade and researched solutions. With the use of software development cycle procedures there were conference room pilots with IT, business users. We then refined the project plan to the core key details, performed mock go-live implementations and finally upgraded the software.

Overall, this was a very successful process.
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
The instructors are usually precise and knowledgable, and it's convenient to take online classes whenever available any day of the year.
SInce this upgrade was a major one with many changes to the look and feel of the application, users would generally need training to help navigate through the different forms and functions included in the new version.

Configuration

Integration with third party applications like Agile for Engineering originally needed custom interfaces, and automated business processes that were specific to the our company had to be customized.

Support

In general, support has not been great - particularly standard (non premium) support .

The main issue is that our IT staff has been using this platform for years and is very knowledgeable Whenever something goes wrong, we usually have a very precise idea of what the problem is. We are skilled at problem diagnosis. But the Oracle support process is very rigid and slow. Typically, we are required to go through a lengthy diagnosis process where they ask us multiple questions sometimes over several days and we are obliged to talk to different people with differing levels of knowledge.

Since we already know what the problem is, we really just want a patch or a bug fix, but it takes days to get there instead of minutes. This can be very frustrating. This is a big part of the reason why we pay for premium support. But it's still a bit disappointing.
Yes - Due to the use of this software for business-critical daily transactions, if there are any bugs or if the software unexpectedly crashes it would directly impact revenue. For this reason, it is imperative that we have access to premium support to keep system downtime to an absolute minimum.

One of the advantages of premium support is that Oracle support staff can log into our instance to directly diagnose issues. We did not have this before.

Usability

The various forms - like order entry forms that allow the uses to enter sales orders and the ability to personalize the views based on end user needs - are easy to use and follow standard business processes. The new release has a big focus on usability and forms now have a familiar web look and feel which has increased usability considerably.

Reliability

Because of the transactional nature of the system this software is available 24 X 7, and IT is responsible for making sure the system is available during normal business hours.

The performance of the product is very good. Given the transactional nature of the system one of the key focus areas for IT is to make sure performance is not affected for internal reasons. This can also depend on the server configuration and setup. For example, performance on Exadata machine is far superior to other Linux custom systems that companies choose to deploy.

In general though, as already pointed out, the platform is now very stable and has few bugs. Whenever there are any issues, the cause is usually customizations that we have made to the platform, rather than out-of-the-box standard functionality.

Integration

  • Agile product lifecycle management system, Salesforce, Sabrix and Third party logistics vendors.
Integration with Agile was developed in-house. This was a customized solution and needed minimal updating because the Agile database schema was the same and only had to be updated to work with R12 tables.

A third-party integrator called Informatica was used between Salesforce and Oracle and Informatica provided the updated integration for R12.
  • Custom partner portal and software portals. The partner portal provides access to some of our content via a front-end portal product that was designed and built in house. Similarly, we built a custom front end for customers allowing them to place orders directly on the web.
  • These are custom interfaces so we would have to build integrations ourselves.

Vendor Relationship

It was relatively easy to work with the Oracle because we usually deal with an account managers who has a very good understanding of the our implementation and what we need in terms of business process optimization.
Because of our long-standing relationship with Oracle account managers and the nature of our implementation, our experience might not be universal. Pricing for such a complex product suite is dependent on many different factors and is, of course, always negotiable.