Microsoft Dynamics GP is an ERP software with accounting capabilities. It includes various packs for customizability and features tailored to specific industries’ needs. GP is offered as a perpetual license or subscription.
Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is a solution that helps users model and plan across finance, HR, supply chain, and sales, streamline the financial close process.
Pricing per user varies by component within the Oracle EPM Cloud solution. Please see pricing information for the EPM Cloud components on cloud.oracle.com or contact Oracle Sales at +1.800.633.0738.
A large company where users have one function- for instance, where someone only receives or works in payables. That minimizes the number of windows they need. A smaller company where one user does multiple functions will require a lot more training and user knowledge to navigate, and it makes it harder to secure users. You also have to understand that GP started life as Great Plains, designed for accountants. The other modules were added on after Microsoft bought Great Plains, which means that modules like Manufacturing are red-headed step children with much smaller support ecosystems. So, if you're starting fresh, you may want to look at something built for the mobile world. D365 and Business Central are a lot more money, buggy, and hard to customize and essentially still vaporware. Microsoft is heavily investing there, leading to the previously mentioned question about the future of GP. If I was starting today I would be hard pressed to justify jumping into GP in a world where Salesforce ties in with so many programs. GP has MRP but it is limited so it's hard to justify a manufacturer starting with GP today.
It is well suited in a geographically distributed environment where you have various key participants in multiple time zones providing input and necessary explanations on performance and measured success It is less appropriate where you have a single office environment with a single finance department working together. It is also less suited when the GL is NOT an Oracle product and the interface between the GL and the reporting software needs to be implemented with utmost care and handling.
Able to be extended into multiple areas of your business
One feature we have been using for a few years is EFT for payables - it has significantly reduced the time spent paying vendors and reduced our check printing and mailing costs. It is very easy to setup and use.
Account Reconciliation CLoud Services provides tight integration with Oracle R12 and 11i . Provides drillback capability. It is flexible and provides rich functionality to users.
We have implemented ARCS on cloud and migrated planning and budgeting from On premise to PBCS and EPBCS. Functionality is onpar with onpremise. Provides regular updates monthly
We don't need to upgrades every year and saved a lot on Hardware.
With respect to the allocations, once the expense is entered into the allocation account, you lose the ability to run any detail on just the total of the expense. It would be nice if you could run a trial balance on the allocation accounts the same way you can with regular accounts.
I've always thought security set up could be a bit simpler. It actually has gotten better through the years. Specifically, with eight separate entities, it would be nice to have a "master" setup where you could call up one group entity, assign the users rights, and then be finished. Currently, whenever I have a new user, I have to call up each individual entity and select all of the features I want the user to have. That means I have to do eight steps for each user.
The limitation of constrained out of the box dimensions that requires ripping the initial implementation to add the new dimensions is a major drawback.
Smartview interface is cumbersome for many.
The only financial adapter is available for integration for other modules we have to go with file-based uploads which is cumbersome and not real-time.
It is very costly in terms of licensing unlike other Oracle products.
Due the economic challenges that Puerto Rico is having, the company has had to merge some companies in order to be more efficient. It has been easy in GP to process those merges, even thought we had to spend days to accomplish that the process was smooth and accurate. In addition we were able to streamline the purchasing and sales process and the organization is confident to keep renewing GP for the future versions.
We have a pretty good userbase who are at the high level who gained value from this tool. Discontinuing this tool is prone to impact their day to day operations. Also the data in this tool cannot alter the source, which maintains the integrity of this tool. Smartview is a cool addition that gained lot of traction as well.
Though it is a basic accounting package, I believe some users do not find the old style menus and navigation options intuitive. There is also a great lack of training resources in the market, so users have to learn the product without guidance a lot, resulting in inefficient workflows and misuse or misunderstanding of many features.
It produces consolidated multi currency reports faster and more accurately whilst adding additional pivotal functionality. The Smartview reporting is a key for us and a flagstone of the application
Support from our implementation partner is a 10/10, but support from Oracle is awful. Case in point: recently over a 2-day period, there were a series of intermittent outages. Oracle actually asked US for the outage time-stamps. I would have thought that, since we were paying them, they should probably be able to tell us!
Basically the challenge with this implementation was the Business Portal, too many errors and even the aplication is up and running the users are still having issues. We will start planning the migraton to GP 2015 soon.
I suggest doubling the time to implement from the initial quote you get from the Sales team. That's always been the case for me for multiple EPMs now. The out-of-the-box functionality of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud is pretty robust so I appreciate that and it really helped us get the ball rolling quickly.
I come from a strong background of using SAP. SAP doesn't have the flexibility of GP, an example would be SAP doesn't allow core mods, if they catch you, you lose support. Microsoft doesn't really care about mods, but they will be quick to have the vendor you used support your issue if it is caused by those mods. With SAP your company adapts to the software, where with GP you adapt the software to you.
Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud fared very well against Adaptive, Anaplan, and Host Analytics. We ultimately decided on Oracle due to its reputation and strength of existing customers. We are happy with our decision.
Microsoft Dynamics GP allows my clients to move from a paper or spreadsheet based company to an integrated, electronic, streamlined business. I love being able to help clients gain efficiencies through the use of Microsoft Dynamics GP.
Microsoft Dynamics GP allows for better customer service because everything is at our fingertips. If someone calls questioning an invoice, we can easily look it up. If someone calls stating they paid an invoice with a certain check number, we can quickly run a query to find that particular check number to see where it was applied.
Having everything on a single platform provides ease of use for upgrades, backups and end user training. There is only one software to learn!
