The Logical Next Step - It all comes together

A while back I said my company was small but had big expensive needs, well we made another commitment. We got the next piece of the puzzle. With HCM/Global Payroll and BI Publisher Enterprise already in our shop we brought everything together with the E-Business Suite. It was pricey but with our Oracle Representative we negotiated a good deal. Still would recommend this system/platform. When properly trained you will get every penny back. Number one recommendation during setup - get a good, experienced consultant.

Pros

We spend stupid money and have many suppliers, we also collect a lot of money that needs to be redistributed across many projects. The power of this system is in the setup. The system becomes fairly intuitive after being properly trained, Its web based and can be accessed from anywhere. I have heard of latency problems when installed remotely but our offices are all in the same country and we spent a few dimes on our network so can't really relate. All the information is tied together and I am a big fan of mass update

Cons

1. A lot of training is required to take full advantage of this system and the training ain't cheap 2. While there is plenty of documentation on everything there is no one piece that just shows you what to do. You have to track down all the pieces. If their where 5 minute videos that just deals with a specific thing from start to finish without all the whys, the back-end info and best practice info life would be great. 3. Its still expensive but worth it if you already have most of the pieces and your organization needs the automation and power

Require a team of support behind it

Pros

It's a corporate level business solution, the number of options and specifications that you can choose from is just tremendous, covering almost all the cases that you might search for.

Cons

when dealing with a small business, it acts just fine, but when we are talking about huge numbers, you need a support team behind it, cause the workflow gets complicated and you get overwhelmed by the number of transitions and statuses, and the customer pipeline get really really long, so in short, unless you get a professional support behind it to assets the business needs, it would be hard to deal with it.

Powerful but antiquated system that can do a lot of things but can't do any of them very well

Pros

1. Oracle EBS contains a variety of modules - AR, AP, GL, Projects, Time/Expense, etc. There is a lot of functionality offered everywhere. 2. Can handle multiple currencies in every module. 3. Best suited for very large companies with huge amounts of data.

Cons

1. Not enough native reporting features, especially when it comes to financials and drilling down into transaction details. 2. Very difficult and costly to implement and maintain. 3. High learning curve, with different modules treating transactions inconsistently.

Positive experience with Oracle

Oracle has been one of the stronger packages I have used in the HR world (and liked the way it fed over to Payroll). Overall, screens were easy to navigate.

Pros

Overall, Oracle was very straight-forward and easy to use. I have used at least 3 or 4 Management tool packages and feel Oracle has been the best one so far.

Cons

We also used Oracle Discoverer for reporting. Although MOST of it was great, there were some things the reporting could not do that made a user have to "know" their data in order to make sure certain data records were not coming out in their report (or, it'd come out and you would have to know to pull out certain data records).

Very good software, easy to use with many useful features

Pros

The software is very easy to use and understand, very little training was required to understand how to use it. Movement between screens is very fast and seamless, very little wait time for the system to make changes or calculations. Follow up and reminder messages are very clear and easy to understand what the system is asking you to do to complete the task.

Cons

Oracle software is a little bit more expensive than many other systems, but offers a better product for the cost than most of it's competitors.