Kepion Planning vs. Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management

Well-suited: Migrating from planning in Excel, scenarios when multiple users are involved in the planning process, scenarios where there is a commitment to improve the planning process and accuracy.

Less appropriate: Where users are looking for a lower-overhead, more visual, less-connected solution.

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.

Incentivized

• Customizable platform: Enables its users to handle just about any kind of budgeting scenarios tailored to each customer needs, whether based on drivers, allocations integrations with other systems (such as S&OP processes).
• Easy integration with other systems: As data is stored within an MS SQL database it is very easy to integrate other applications with it for reporting, such as Tableau or PowerBI or from other downline systems such as S&OP.
• Real-time: Enables the possibility to calculate bottom line results for all applications immediately allowing the possibility to calculate easily what-if scenarios.
• Not stuck: within a single way of budgeting. as part of the beyond budgeting movement, companies have been creating a more driver-based high-level forecasting which is often a problem with specific budgeting systems that are locked within the P&L statement. Here you can make it as simple or as complicated as needed.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Interface: The interface is built in Silverlight, so is a little clunky and inflexible. Kepion are, however, planning to launch a HTML5 version in March 2018, which will greatly enhance the product.
• Visualisation: We usually use Kepion for data entry and deep analysis, and then leverage tools like Power BI or Tableau to visualise data or create aggregated management reports.

• Our implementation consultant set up all the business rules for calculations to get us live, and we may have difficulty setting up new ones going forward. We feel like that we now need to hire someone who has the technical knowledge to help us to manage the system going forward.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

EPM has been so far available all the time

Incentivized

The product performance is so far very good

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

The biggest key is data validation time. If you are implementing a new chart of accounts along with Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, you need to multiply the time you think you can perform data validation by 2. The key to managing your project timeline is managing your expectations around data validation as well. For instance, it is recommended you convert 1-3 years vs. 5 years.

Incentivized

We are a Microsoft gold analytics partner. As such, we were looking for a Microsoft friendly solution which would fit into our analytics stack with Tableau on top. Kepion is a lightweight easy to use solution which integrates perfectly with the Microsoft framework. It is much easier to use and intuitive than the heavy Cognos and SAP/BO systems. However, if my existing infrastructure is Cognos, SAP or Oracle I would consider using that technology. For Microsoft SQL companies this is a great choice.

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud is one of the more robust and well-rounded EPMs on the market. It comes with robust out-of-the-box functionality which is a great benefit in comparison to its peers. The Excel integration is also top notch which Financial Analysts really appreciate. Cost is a little high and maintenance is a bit heaver than other tools so that is something to consider. The product keeps improving!

Incentivized

The product is scalable

Incentivized

• Significantly reduced the amount of money we spent for the maintenance of in-house hardware.
• We now need less employees to manage the configurations of Oracle EPM Cloud.
• There have been many time savings as a whole to apply to more productive causes.

Incentivized