Oracle Hyperion (legacy) vs. Workday Adaptive Planning

Well suited: For use in multiple offices around the world. I was able to obtain financial reporting data from 5 foreign offices and then consolidate their data with 3 domestic USA offices to prepare a consolidated financial statement. Less Appropriate: Translating the financial value for consulting services could be a bit challenging because that required human interaction and judgement. It would have been great to be able to set up some software to be able to interpret this and let it run for all future project work revenue projection.

Incentivized

In a previous company, I was hired based on my experience with Workday Adaptive Planning. After being hired and reviewing the company, I quickly determined they were not large of enough of a company to need the program. Instead, we made better Excel budget templates, utilized OneDrive and created a better experience without the cost. Left the job after 9 months because I worked my way out of the position. My next role I looked for bigger companies and had better success with implementation.

Incentivized

• HFM is very powerful for financial consolidations .
• Hyperion Planning is used to project accurate planning and thus provide the benefit to organization to do allocations and driver based planning so that it can justify the numbers based on headcount, number of stops & Revenue and thus provide valuable projections and thus help reduce the expenses.
• Essbase is powerful engine helps provide analytical adhoc reporting for financial users . Performance of reporting and ease of use helps excellent customers experience when doing adhoc analysis.

Incentivized

• Version Management. Adaptive lets us manage many versions/scenarios all in one platform with the robust ability to compare them to each other.
• Processing Performance. With the Elastic Hypercube technology that was implemented a few years back, we can watch changes flow through a complex web of formulas and arrive at an answer within seconds.
• Audit Trail. Our administrators love the ability to see and report on who made what changes when, which leads to real accountability within the organization.

Incentivized

• Oracle Hyperion requires a lot of knowledge and expertise to be successful.
• The underlying infrastructure of Oracle Hyperion is complex and can be difficult to implement.
• Some of the Oracle Hyperion application servers only run on Windows. Windows can sometimes be unstable.
• Oracle Hyperion application server processes are dependent on each other and need to be started in a specific order. Therefore, if certain services die on one server, it could require all services/processes in the entire Hyperion landscape to be restarted in the correct order.

Incentivized

• Web reports and sheets are not great for in-depth reporting, and require the use of the OfficeConnect for Excel plugin and, therefore, the use of Excel for extensive reporting capabilities.
• It has limited formula functionality in some instances, requiring again the use of OfficeConnect for Excel for extensive calculations.
• I would like to see new planning sheet types or upgrades to existing sheet types; functionality has been the same for over 10 years.

Incentivized

We're in the middle of the road because we are not sure that other products on the market fit the bill for what we need yet. Hyperion is expensive and burdensome from an administrator and maintenance standpoint, but it still seems to be the best solution for what we need. Show us an equally capable SaaS consolidation product and we'll talk again.

For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.

Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.

There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.

All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.

The premium support team provides much needed dedicated customer service which we are after for what we have paid for this service. We are satisfied with the service and support and do not have any instance where there was an issue that requires escalation to get the right support team. Though the incidence of major issues that requires the premium support are less, we prefer to keep this as a safety net.

Incentivized

Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.

Incentivized

This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.

Incentivized

They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.

Incentivized

Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.

Incentivized

Hyperion is easy to implement and maintain, low cost of ownership is also a great reason to select this product. Oracle's investment to keep the product innovations and improvements over the years is well appreciated by the users. The ease of managing integration with different business systems is also considered while selecting this product.

Incentivized

For best-in-class capabilities, you'll very likely need to split the various HR and financial systems into separate systems rather than using a consolidated platform like Workday. However, a consolidated platform provides benefits by being a single location for employees and a single system for IT developers to work with. This would need to be compared to employee efficiencies gained by working with better systems.

Incentivized

We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale

• We had to get the planning application designed correctly before we got a good ROI, but once we did it became well liked and highly utilized.
• It has had a very positive overall impact on increasing finance literacy across campus, allowing units a better insight into their revenues and expenses and the overall planning process.
• It has been an essential tool during a time where the campus needed to reduce it's budget by over 100 million dollars annually. Without this product, we would not have a way to identify, track and report on our progress reducing the budget.

Incentivized

• it is easier to take critical business decisions in the organization and respond to stakeholder early
• migration of resources like cloud, servers or operating system or migrations does not lead to impact on platform
• helps calculates complex metrics requires for financial and resource planning

Incentivized