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"At Technology Evaluation Centers, we help companies like yours
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Source: Technology Evaluation Centers
TEC Product Certification Report: Oracle E-Business Suite (12.1) for Mixed-mode ERP
Mixed-Mode ERP is also known as :
Mixed Mode Enterprise Resource Planning,
ERP for Mixed-Mode Manufacturing Solutions,
TEC's ERP Evaluation Center,
ERP for Mixed-Mode Manufacturing Model,
Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Development,
Enterprise Resource Planning Marketing,
Enterprise Resource Planning Distribution,
ERP Deployment,
ERP Software Package,
Most Extensive ERP Products,
Oracle E-Business Suite ERP,
ERP Systems,
ERP Software,
ERP System's Interface,
ERP Ease of Use,
ERP Layout,
ERP Performing Task,
ERP Workflow Design,
ERP Server,
ERP Information Retrieval,
ERP Email Notification,
ERP Data Export,
ERP Reporting Capabilities,
ERP Innovation,
ERP New Features,
ERP Security,
Strategic ERP Application.
Table of Contents
Oracle E-Business Suite (12.1) has been certified by
Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst
Gabriel Gheorghiu, TEC Research Analyst
Demonstration conducted by
Balakrishnan Kumarapuram, Oracle Global Partner Demo Services, Director
Raphael Lallemand, Oracle Midsize Applications Programs, Director
Sandip Bagchi, Oracle
Ranjith Krishnamoorthy, Oracle
Sayan Chatterjee, Oracle
Anuj Saxena, Oracle
Degang Fu, Oracle
Narasimha Gabbita, Oracle
Saralikanth Potluri, Oracle
Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) is pleased to announce that Oracle's product E-Business
Suite (12.1) is now TEC Certified for online evaluation of ERP for Mixed-mode Manufacturing
solutions in TEC's ERP Evaluation Center. The ERP Evaluation Center enables you to compare
and evaluate functionality based on TEC's comprehensive ERP for Mixed-mode Manufacturing model.
Data used in the Evaluation Center are obtained from the vendor's responses to TEC's request for information (RFI).
Certification ensures that
- Oracle E-Business Suite product capabilities are demonstrated
to a TEC analyst based on the responses Oracle provided in its completed TEC RFI;
- Oracle E-Business Suite RFI data has been reviewed analytically and comparatively by
a TEC analyst against known benchmarks.
There are many benefits to evaluating a TEC Certified product. To potential
clients of a software vendor, TEC certification provides the following:
- Reassurance: You can be assured that the data TEC provides about its certified
products conform to a well-defined standard of accuracy. When a vendor's product is TEC Certified,
it means that a trusted, independent third party has seen the product up close.
- Better Communication with Vendors: TEC certification helps ensure that vendors
understand and respond accurately to their clients' RFI criteria. Certification with TEC analysts
provides the opportunity to clarify any issues with the RFI criteria. This ensures that the vendor
is speaking the same language as its potential clients—and gives the clients an unambiguous specification
of product functionality to inform their selections.
The certification seal is a valuable indicator for organizations that rely on the integrity of TEC's
research services for assistance with their software selection projects. Organizations looking for a
solution can be confident that they're comparing the product on an "apples to apples" basis with other, similar products.
Oracle Corporation is one of the most-recognized global software companies in the world, and is
a leader in information management systems and business applications software development,
including enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems development, marketing, distribution, and
deployment, along with related consulting, educational, and support services. Oracle E-Business
Suite is its flagship ERP software package, and is positioned as an application for all types of
businesses, of all sizes—from small entities to large multinational corporations. A few modules
of the product have been on the market since the late 80s; it is now respected worldwide for its
robustness, functionality, and scalability. The E-Business Suite can be successfully used by a business
of any size—however, the software reaches its highest potential when it is used in midsized businesses
and in large and multinational organizations with a wide geographical presence and a significant number of employees.
Being a global IT organization and the developer of one of the most extensive ERP products on the
market, Oracle inarguably has all the necessary resources to develop and maintain the product, and
in-depth knowledge of vertical industries for a long list of businesses and operation areas. The
Oracle E-Business Suite application's customers include thousands of small, medium, and large
multinational manufacturers, retailers and distributors, facilities, services, and governmental
organizations. The company offers many preconfigured vertical solutions that are created by its
partners around the globe, and that make the implementation process shorter and easier to manage.
Oracle E-Business Suite ERP is successfully used at businesses and organizations for whom the number
of users ranges from dozens to as many as tens of thousands. The company delivers the software application
translated into all major languages, and offers support in more than 145 countries. The on-demand version
of Oracle E-Business Suite ERP is also available for companies that prefer hosted and managed applications.
Upon reviewing Oracle E-Business Suite ERP during the TEC certification process, TEC analysts determined
that the application is very rich in functionality; it is a fit for practically any business model and
any size of organization. At the same time, its user interface screens and menus are unified and consistent;
the view and logic are visual and user-friendly. The layout of the screens makes the system relatively easy to navigate.
As far as the functionality of the Oracle E-Business Suite ERP system is concerned, the following are the highlights:
- Oracle's open architecture allows for integration of different systems between various departments and regions.
- This product is certainly very complex and sophisticated, and has many different applications,
processes, and internal tools. This sophistication makes it likely that users will need to expend considerable
efforts to learn and become familiar with all the available tools and features.
- Oracle E-Business Suite ERP system is a flexible and complete product in terms of the availability
of multinational, multilanguage, multicurrency, and multisite functionality. The product is truly global
and can be especially beneficial in this type of business environment.
- The system's user interface features the usual screen texts, menus, tabs, and combination thereof
with graphical representation of information, such as embedded diagrams and charts. It allows users to
work with information quickly and with a minimal number of errors.
- Oracle E-Business Suite ERP contains built-in search and select functionality—a very powerful and
helpful tool that is not often seen in ERP systems.
- There are many types of customizable dashboards throughout the entire application that help managers
and other users involved in their business processes to control functions.
- Operations that are similar for different business subdivisions can be centralized and unified to prevent
data inconsistency and errors (e.g., the global tax engine, the centralized payments engine, the unified
bank account model). Also, the whole back-office model can be copied from one operational unit to another.
- The system provides the ability to convert raw shop floor data into formats that can be further used
by the business intelligence (BI) application to create analytics, reports, and dashboards.
- The touch screen feature allows users to directly manage manufacturing execution processes on the shop floor.
- The master data management (MDM) application can centrally control all business processes associated
with different physical locations (such as remote corporate subdivisions or customer sites), including
integration with mapping and other third-party applications.
- Oracle Business Intellignt Publisher is a tool that provides easy creation and modification of
documents generated by the BI application.
Despite all the software's features and advantages, Oracle E-Business Suite's level of functionality
can be superfluous for some small businesses—sometimes exceeding their requirements. However, it must
be noted that Oracle Corporation exerts significant efforts to make the application less complicated
for small and medium businesses, by providing them with faster and easier configuration and implementation
methods and tools. At the same time, complexity-as-a-weakness is also another of the system's strengths,
which is the ability to support an expanding business and to support the future needs of a growing company.
A highly scalable ERP system, by definition, does not limit a company in its increasing functional and
technical requirements, and will remain adequate and efficient for any business scenario.
Based on four main principles, here is how Oracle E-Business Suite ERP fared.
Ease of Use
- Layout: A tier-one ERP system's interface is complex by definition, but taking this
into consideration, the layout is straightforward and uncluttered. Information is arranged in screens, frames,
and boxes, which allows for simple multitasking.
- Interface: The software has a fairly intuitive and logical interface which is highly
configurable; its pattern and style are designed in Oracle's typical conservative manner, and are consistent
throughout the screens of the system's major modules.
- Performing tasks: Tasks performed in any specific module are logically defined and
accomplished. However, they do require that the user be trained on the application. The number of steps
required to perform an average task was also reduced in the last release. Navigation: There are additional
navigation tools and features available that make navigation easier and faster. Oracle E-Business Suite also
supports touch-screen interfaces for shop floor information access and entering.
Workflow Design
- Server: The solution can be deployed on the client's premise, or can be hosted and
managed by the vendor.
- Information retrieval: The multiple querying, reporting, and auditing capabilities
of the software allow users to search and track information they need. Often, users do not even need to
run a report to obtain particular information; it can be easily obtained via a search-and-select function.
- E-mail notifications: Pre-built role-specific alerts and notifications are available,
and their settings can be easily configured for particular users or user groups.
- Data export: Users can easily export data to Microsoft Excel and other third-party applications.
- Reporting capabilities: The solution offers extensive reporting and BI capabilities
that are embedded into the software (for example: role-based analytical interface, dashboard tools, and
multiple standard reports), or that are offered as a standalone application (Oracle Enterprise Performance Management).
Ease of Modification
- Setup: The user interface is highly configurable according to user preferences
and needs. Many fields, buttons, tabs, and general layouts of screens can be easily created or modified
as required.
- Flexibility: No hard coding is required for screen and user workspace modification;
they can be reconfigured for the entire organization, at the department level (or for user groups), or
at the user level.
- Integration capabilities: The solution offers seamless integration of core modules
of E-Business Suite, and easy integration with other Oracle products or third-party applications using
the flexible Oracle Application Integration Architecture and Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture Suite products.
Innovation
- New features: In release 12.1, E-Business Suite Oracle offers many new technical
and functional features that allow businesses to better organize data, increase efficiency, and improve
the visibility and accuracy of the data. Many of these features are innovations with respect to the ERP
industry as a whole.
- Security: Multiple-level access control technology allows various authorization
settings according to user, group, or department, or by combined or segregated duties.
- Scalability: As evidenced by the vendor's marketing message, the application has
superior scalability, from as few as 5 users to over 10,000 users. It offers the ability to set up
multiple sites for different legal entities or remote subdivisions within the same company.
SAP with its ERP products is Oracle's principal competitor in the ERP field. However, other tier-one
and major tier-two vendors such as Lawson, Microsoft Dynamics AX, and Infor often compete with the
Oracle E-Business Suite application, especially in the mid-market niche.
Using the TEC Advisor decision support engine, we have prepared high-level graphs that identify this
product's functional focus.
This TEC Focus Indicator (FI) tells you which types of functionality are most likely to differentiate
E-Business Suite from other mixed-mode manufacturing ERP products. It includes three zones indicating
the product's focus: the Dominant zone, Competitive zone, and Not Competitive zone.
TEC's models of software systems are designed with a comprehensive breadth; generally vendors will
deliver a common base of functionality. While we believe in the necessity of knowing whether a product
supports a base of common functionality, it's very helpful to understand how a product really differs from the crowd.
The bars in this FI chart represent neither the quality of the product nor an absolute quantity of
supported functionality. Rather, the bars show support relative to the average solution.
The functional focus arrow indicates which modules of this product provide an equal or greater
quantity of support than the average solution. Modules near the top of the functional focus arrow
reveal where Oracle E-Business Suite is more likely to differentiate itself through breadth of
functionality. The more concern you have for the type of functionality near the top of the functional
focus, the more it's to your advantage to explore this product further.
The top Overall bar shows the overall difference in supported functionality between E-Business
Suite and the average solution. To understand how we calculate this difference read the Calculating
the TEC FI section, which follows.
The Overall bar is our measure for determining which modules fall within the Dominant zone. If a
module's difference from the average is greater than the product's overall difference from the
average, we label it dominant. Those are the modules most responsible for pulling the Overall bar
beyond the average.
Modules with values that do not extend beyond the Overall bar but still provide as much or more
functionality than the average solution, are labeled competitive.
Oracle E-Business Suite has two modules located in the Dominant zone: Human Resource Management
and Process Manufacturing Management.
The biggest difference between the average ERP mixed-mode product and Oracle's product is in the
Human Resource module. The level of support for human resources in Oracle E-Business Suite is far
ahead of its average competitor; ratings are a bit closer only in the health and safety functional area.
The process manufacturing module also demonstrates excellent ratings, which exceed an average
solution in all functional modules, particularly in Formulas/Recipes and Conformance Reporting.
More details about the modules in the Dominant zone are available in the Functionality Benchmark
section of this report.
The area of functional focus within the green Dominant zone indicates two things. First, it
indicates which of the most competitive modules contribute the most pull in raising the product's
score above the average. Second, it indicates where the product has a significantly greater level
of support for functionality than the average solution in this space.
This also may reveal how the vendor has focused its product development. These modules may or may
not make up the bulk or even the core of the functionality within the product but if you require
more than the average breadth of functionality from these modules, this product will stand a better
than average chance of satisfying your requirements.
Oracle E-Business Suite has six modules located in the Competitive zone: Manufacturing Management,
Financials, Inventory Management, Quality Management, Purchasing Management, and Sales Management.
Although overall, Oracle E-Business Suite's rating is higher than the average solution for mixed-mode
ERP, it must be noted that for some modules (such as Sales and Purchasing Management), the support level
difference is not as significant as it is for the Human Resource module. This means that, functionality-wise,
competitor products approach the level of E-Business Suite.
More details of the modules in the Competitive zone are available in the Functionality Benchmark section.
The area of functional focus within the green Competitive zone indicates where the product has a level
of support for functionality that is somewhat greater or on par with the average solution.
In some cases a module may be considered a commodity within the market so many vendors offer the
majority of the functionality, thus it is difficult to differentiate a product based on breadth
of functionality. In other cases, a vendor may intend its product to compete on a level that satisfies
most customers' requirements for certain modules, however its focus on the market requires that it
differentiate itself through other modules.
At the top functional level there is no module that Oracle E-Business Suite does not support at a lower
level than an average solution—the overall functionality of the system surpasses an average mixed-mode ERP solution.
The area in the red Not Competitive zone indicates where the product supports a lesser quantity of
functionality than an average solution. Modules listed in this section are unlikely to be as important
to the vendor's target market as the other modules. It may also be the case that the product is a newer
entrant to the space. If the product has a lot of modules in the Not Competitive zone it signifies a more
finely scoped target for its functionality than other products, which may be indicative of a point solution.
Even if a product has modules in the Not Competitive zone it may still be entirely capable of satisfying
your requirements for this functionality, particularly if the average solution offers more functionality
than you require. Nevertheless you should be aware that if you require a greater than average breadth of
functionality from a module in the Not Competitive zone, this product may not offer all of what you require.
It's likely that you would need to review the product in more depth to determine whether its functionality is sufficient.
TEC defines an average solution using data about real software products available on the market. We
calculate an average of the capabilities about which vendors recently provided us with information and
that we've certified. We define these capabilities and assign numeric ratings representing various levels
of support in our models of enterprise software. These models may be accessed on our publicly available
evaluation centers. Typically, we use anywhere from a thousand to several thousand criteria to determine
the average scores.
The average solution forms the benchmark from which we calculate the difference in functionality offered by
E-Business Suite. We plot the average solution's capabilities at point zero on the X axis.
Next, we determine the quantity of functionality supported by E-Business Suite for each module in our model.
We assume that all criteria are equally important. In a real world situation of course, you would give a
greater priority to criteria that are more important for your needs. However, for the sake of the TEC FI
analysis, we want to understand something about the product's focus independent of any users' functional
priorities. (Note: If you wish to prioritize and evaluate the product's functionality, you can do so online
in our ERP Evaluation Center.)
We calculate the difference between E-Business Suite and the average solution, and we plot that value as a
positive or negative distance from zero (the average solution's capability). If, for example, E-Business
Suite offers a greater quantity of support for a particular module than found in the average solution, its
line will extend to the right of zero.
It's important to note as well that just because a product has more or less functionality than other products
does not mean it is a good or bad product. To understand whether it will do what you need it to do, at a price
within your budget, you must evaluate the product in depth.
The following functionality benchmark graphs represent E-Business Suite's quantity of support for the
functionality within each module identified in the TEC Focus Indicator. The further the solid line extends
toward the edge of the graph, the more functionality E-Business Suite supports. For the sake of comparison,
you can see what you might expect from the average solution by viewing the dashed, orange line.
The ratings for the Oracle E-Business Suite in the Human Resources module demonstrates an excellent result
for Benefits Management, Payroll, Employee Self-service, Employees Metrics, and Training, where scares are
equal to 100 percent. In the Personnel Management submodule, its rating is also very close to 100 percent.
In Health and Safety Management, it goes down slightly to 76 percent (corresponding to a similar decrease
in the average solution curve), and in Workforce Management area it is at 93 percent, again higher than the
average rating.
In the Process Manufacturing Management area, the Oracle E-Business Suite compares well to the average
process manufacturing solution. In all six submodules, its rating is higher than the average. Specifically,
ratings are over 96 percent for Formulas/Recipes, Process Model (Formulas + Routings), and Process Manufacturing
Costing. The ratings are a bit lower in the case of Process Batch Control and Reporting, Conformance Reporting,
and Material Management; however, ratings still considerably exceed the average.
The Oracle E-Business Suite is strong in Manufacturing Management, as demonstrated in the graph below. The
rating results here are stable and exceed 96 percent for almost all submodules. The average solution rating
is close to Oracle's in Shop Floor Control, Product Data Management, and especially in Product Costing.
The rating of Oracle E-Business Suite's Finance module is excellent—it is equal or almost equal to 100
percent. However, its competitors also demonstrate good results, as their average is around 94 percent
for the entire module. The biggest difference between Oracle E-Business Suite and the average is in Fixed
Assets, Budgeting, and Cost Accounting.
Although the ratings for Oracle E-Business Suite are high here as they are across the board, the ratings
for its competitors in the Inventory Management module are similarly high. The best rating for the average
solution here is in Data Requirements, Reporting and Interfacing requirements, and in Inventory Management—Online
Requirements, where the average solution demonstrates almost as well as the Oracle solution. The largest
difference lies in Forecasting, Reservations and Allocations, and in Processing Requirements.
In the Quality Management module, results are straightforward—the difference between Oracle E-Business
Suite and the average solution is only 4.08 percent. Note that the total number of criteria for this module
is low compared to other modules.
As far as purchasing management functionality is concerned, there are two areas where Oracle E-Business
Suite's rating is lower than the average solution's: Online Requirements for Purchasing Management, and
Reporting and Interfacing Requirements for Purchasing Management. In other submodules, the Oracle solution's
ratings are higher. The most significant difference in support levels is demonstrated in the following
modules: Rating of Suppliers, Purchase Orders, and Requisitions and Quotations.
In four functional areas for sales management functionality (out of six in total), ratings for the Oracle
E-Business Suite exceed those for the average solution. The best results it shows are in Available-to-promise
(ATP), Customer Service and Returned Goods Handling, Customer Relationships Management and E-Commerce
Requirements, and Online Requirements. However in two submodules (Pricing and Discounting, and Reporting
and Interfacing Requirements) Oracle's product ratings are lower than those for the average solution.
Oracle's E-Business Suite application demonstrates a strong lead in all eight functional areas reviewed.
Analysis of the graphs and software ratings clearly shows that this product is one of the dominant solutions
on the market: it is mature, well-balanced, innovative, and comprehensive in functionality. Different types
and sizes of businesses may benefit from Oracle E-Business Suite as either a core ERP system or as a selection
of modules because of the product's flexibility and scalability, as well as the availability of a large number
of vertically tailored solutions.
Based on TEC's product research during the product certification process, we consider this product to be well
established, reliable, and suitable for companies that are dedicated to performance improvement and future development.
Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) helps private- and public-sector organizations choose the best
enterprise software solutions for their unique business needs—quickly, impartially, and cost-effectively.
TEC's online Evaluation Centers, containing IT research and extensive knowledge bases that catalog vendors'
support for thousands of enterprise software features and functions, are the leading resource for IT decision
makers around the world. By combining that information with a proven methodology, unique Web-based software
selection platforms, and years of software selection expertise, TEC delivers an unmatched range of online
software evaluation and selection services that bridge the gap between enterprise decision makers and the
vendor/value-added reseller (VAR) community.
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