A worthy ERP system with lots of flexibility, but at a cost
November 06, 2017
A worthy ERP system with lots of flexibility, but at a cost
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with PeopleSoft Financials
We use PeopleSoft Financials as our ERP system, across the entire company. Modules that we use are Billing, Contracts, Project Costing, ePro, sPro, Purchasing, Payables, Expenses, and GL.
Due to our business needs, we have customized each module to varying degrees in order to accommodate different lines of business or services that the company provides. We are not bound by limitations imposed by PeopleSoft Financials, but have the flexibility to customize as needed to meet the changing needs of our business.
My review is mainly from technical perspective due to my experience supporting PeopleSoft Financials.
My review is mainly from technical perspective due to my experience supporting PeopleSoft Financials.
- With a good technical support team, PeopleSoft Financials can do just about anything that a business needs. In my experience, there is no limit to what can be accomplished, but good requirements from business is a must (yes, this applies to any software customization) in order to achieve good outcome and to prevent development from spiraling out of control.
- Integration with external/3rd party systems can be accomplished somewhat easily. From using the standard integration method of using flat files (easy) for batch processing to web services (challenging) for real time data sync is all possible and all necessary elements are available with any implementation of PeopleSoft.
- PeopleSoft's development platform, PeopleTools, gives developers access to every aspect of PeopleSoft Financials in order to meet the needs of end users. Tweaks can be made to control the look and feel of any component and page. If needed, how data is presented on online pages can be easily controlled without altering the backend data. Flexibility that is made available in PeopleSoft is tremendous.
- PeopleSoft is owned by Oracle so any issues or bugs need to be logged through a service request (SR) via My Oracle Support. It is cumbersome to log a SR and support that is provided isn't always helpful, particularly since Oracle will not help with any customization issues. Typically lots of trace files or documentations are required before a support engineer can provide relevant input.
- Users often got frustrated with pages that weren't as user friendly as it could be. Users want similar experience of easily navigating through Amazon web sites, but many components/pages in PeopleSoft requires user training. Then again, the ERP system is technical in nature so it shouldn't be like buying books on Amazon...
- I mentioned the many ways to perform data integration, but web service route takes a highly skilled technical developer to do it well. There are so many pieces to the puzzle that it can be quite challenging. Also, using RESTful web service is limited by PS not supporting OAuth authentication protocol.
- Our core users are satisfied with capabilities in PeopleSoft Financials. They may initially find it less intuitive at first, but with some proper user training, users find that this is good product.
- Flexibility with ability to customize allowed us to implement several 3rd party software without difficulty.
- Upgrading to new release is a complicated and can be a drawn out process. Cost of upgrading can be high compared to other smaller ERP systems.