Oracle Hyperion Planning Reviews & Product Details

The Excel tool allows you to see various intersegments at once Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Web tool is slow and only allows one intersegment at once Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The organization and structure of the explore functions. The ease to change sorts and filters to find records Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

How easy it is to adjust records. And the permissions settings Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The most useful aspect of Hyperion is the ability to retrieve data from the system within offline excel files as long as you have the Smart View add-in enabled. The refresh is quick and the data is always clear to reconcile back to the total values input into the system. Our company uses the application to house our revenue and expense detail by client, by account, and by period. It is very easy for us to manipulate reports and excel files to retrieve data from Hyperion to suit our needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main problem that I have had while using Hyperion is the difficulty of input into the system. While retrieving data from Hyperion is quick and simple, the actual upload into various schedules and memo templates can pose difficulties. For example, each month my company needs to upload re-phased projected revenue for each month. If client A had $100 in revenue booked previously, but now we realized that this will now need to be $0 - the system will not allow it. For some reason, if there was data entered previously for Client A, 0 cannot be accepted to re-submit - a value needs to be input. So we spend more time than we should each month typing in ".000000001" as an input for each month/client/account. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have used this at my current job and my previous job. It's very easy to learn and very easy to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's freezes up sometimes, and often I have to log out and log back in.. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use Hyperion Planning on a daily basis. I find this to be a critical tool for not only project management, but for financial analysis of large data sets. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The software is somewhat limited when trying to query multiple tables at once. I end up going back to SQL or Access at times for a quicker turnaround. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

long range planning, capital reporting, scale Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

user interface and business rule wait time Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Hyperion Planning is a great model for planning and reporting because it provides a simple solution for finance teams to track their company’s key financial metrics. The Hyperion Planning forms offer easy data entry for financial analysts to input and track their budgets, forecasts, actuals, commitments, and any other scenarios the company may use. All Planning data is stored in a multi-dimensional database called Essbase. Planning also leverages a relational database that is used to load metadata into Planning. This comes in handy for other uses such as loading actuals from an ERP system.

One of the best advantages of Hyperion Planning is that it makes reporting very easy. I have seen many cases where analysts would use Excel spreadsheets to track all kinds of financial data, and it would take hours or days to create a report when it was requested by an executive. Smart View, the Excel-based add-in to Planning, removes this hassle. Smart View contains ad-hoc capabilities and allows users to quickly request data out of Planning. Users can generate all types of reports based on the data from Planning, such as sales, capital expenditures, or variance reports like Budget vs Actuals. If you take it a step further and use Hyperion Financial Reporting, you can create customized reports to deliver to users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would like to see performance enhancements in the next few versions of Hyperion Planning. Sometimes scrolling and searching through dimensions is slow, as well as rendering data forms. Oracle has said there are some improvements with the 11.1.2.4 version, but I have not used it in a business environment yet. A multi-dimensional database also has certain limitations when pulling metadata. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Overall, the product's data entry and extraction tools are excellent. Like most systems, management and maintenance dictates its effectiveness. The organizations I worked for had excellent support and management for their Hyperion tools and they were very useful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The UI/UX could be a lot more friendly, including the integration with excel. The web form wasn't optimized for all browsers and can run slow. The excel integration (Smartview) runs much faster speedwise, but the user interface is not as friendly. If you're an excel jockey, it takes some personal macros to reduce your keystrokes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

You can customize it based on your business needs. I co-led that effort at one of my previous employers, and it was a huge success. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What you input is what you get. Once move away from the Off-The-Shelf option, it requires significant investment. However, the human ROI (time savings to generate state-of-art-reports with a click of a button, etc.) is very positive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Hyperion Planning provides the platform for businesses to significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their budgeting and planning functions. Too often, large and complex businesses run budgets through a myriad of excel sheets whereas Hyperion Planning provides a tool to re-focus staff time on analysis and decision-making instead of consolidating last years budget and actual data into a spreadsheet.

Oracle has invested in Hyperion since it was acquired and this technology has a very solid footprint in number of clients and number of industries used. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Hyperion Planning requires detailed design and configurations at each customer which can cause an implementation timeline to be longer than desired. However, this does result in a customized solution to meet each business' specific needs.

Hyperion can also have challenges with large datasets. This challenges can be met with creative/custom solutions and performance tuning of software settings and hardware. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.