Aptean Ross ERP vs. Oracle E-Business Suite

Ross ERP was designed for and excels in process manufacturing environments. It is best leveraged in companies with strong management support for technology with a strong understanding of the business and manufacturing processes and a willingness to engage in the design and operation of the system. It is less suited for organizations looking for cut and paste solutions that don't' require input from the users and management. It is whatever you make of it.

Incentivized

Oracle Cash and Treasury Management fill the gaps in treasury management with features that are very helpful in building the modern financial system that we so desperately need. It may not be the most intuitive tool on the treasury market, but with a little more practice time, important expense analysis can be achieved. I am confident in this treasury tool for this year 2022 and I would like to recommend it to other companies so that they can also have a better administration.

Incentivized

• Development: the facet that sold us on Ross was the interaction with the user community and the commitment to development with the users in mind. They are by far the most customer driven company I've worked with in terms of product improvement and development. Companies of all sizes are heard and they're suggestions coalesced into a development plan that delivers value for your maintenance dollars.
• Lot Traceability: Ross ERP gives us a competitive edge in time for lot trace across multiple sku's and distribution lanes.
• Process manufacturing management. Ross recipe and process spec management is very robust, allowing us to capture and manage our yields and costs across labor and numerous types of ingredient inputs. Process manufacturing can be more complex then discrete, and Ross was built for process manufacturing.

Incentivized

• The EBS Oracle Order Management and Shipping Execution solution allows the creation of an integrated, seamless order-to-cash process and accurately capture of customer orders across multiple channels.
• Orchestration of order details for seamless fulfillment execution.
• Efficient shipment planning and confirmation.
• Communication of order status information to customers throughout the order lifecycle.

Incentivized

• More cross functionality with Factory MES.
• Ease with material issue.

• Because the application is working globally, it sometimes hangs and the connection is dropped.
• It should have more shortcuts to make it easier to develop macros. I create many macros and use the "sendkeys" command in VBA, due to the lack of these shortcuts, it is not possible to automate the process.
• For now I can not think of other areas that require improvement.

Incentivized

After almost 5 years, we have a full control of this ERP System. We are able to implement new functionalities and modules without any major "consulting" expenses. As of today we are making almost 90% of the personalization/customization and implementation all in house. Once [it] is tuned, [it] keeps running very well with no major issues.

Incentivized

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.

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.

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.

The instructors are usually precise and knowledgable, and it's convenient to take online classes whenever available any day of the year.

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.

Ross by and far has the most features and support for what is out there. Where most ERP systems everything is add ons, Ross builds those for the most part directly into their applications

Without knowing what product you have now I can not tell you the stack up. I don't want to tell you that this is better than what you have as I have not seen your setup. What I can tell you is that you can't go wrong with the Oracle name. It's a worldwide name and that alone should be taken into consideration. However, talk to your sales reps. Get all the information. Pay an independent Contractor to evaluate what it's truly going to take before going down this road.

Incentivized

As I mentioned, it's a good tool but not the best

Incentivized

• Ross was implement over 14 years ago for us and that is when I started. I know Ross was a blessing to our company at the time of implementation.

• We recently implemented Supplier Portal and Invoice Imaging Solution. This has reduced manual effort and increased speed and accuracy. There is no need for people to key in invoices manually now. Suppliers can flip a purchase order into invoice and Oracle will do all the validations and put the invoice on hold in case of any discrepancy.
• Suppliers are very happy with the supplier portal as they can track the entire lifecycle of the invoice online.
• With automation, we could bill all our customers on time. Oracle collects all the possible costs like payroll and expenses, adds markup, and bills our customers. We could track profitability and margins by project.
• The period close and reporting has become easier and faster with this software. 3 people can close the periods now as opposed to 10 before.

Incentivized