Aptean Encompix ERP vs. BlueCherry

If an organization often makes standard products and purchases standard material for those products, then this ERP suits well for such scenarios, where there is a standard list of material - which can be used to build Item Master records in Encompix. And it's well suited for companies which do keep inventory / stock. Not well suited if the organization doesn't have item masters, and every product is a custom product.

Incentivized

Blue Cherry is competitively priced to compete with other solutions. It is well suited where a good training system is in place in the business and where at least a small IT team is present. I also would recommend on-prem installations as opposed to cloud-based as I have heard negative feedback about the cloud-based product. Blue Cherry may be more appropriate for companies that either are still developing their processes and can be tweaked to fit within the Blue Cherry ecosystem, or in larger companies where they can afford potentially substantial costs to customize Blue Cherry to their needs or desires.

Incentivized

• Materials or purchasing module is good
• Accounting and milestone payments are easy to use
• Purchases are very detailed, and we can see when any line item has been ordered or received

Incentivized

• Manage production orders which is the primary portion of the business.
• Manage Sales Orders including allocation based on rules so we can manage order fulfilment successfully.
• Manage Designs and promotion to Styles which works so much smoother when integrated in the same base software.
• Manage Invoicing and credit memos and be able to report on NSR and total sales, units moved, etc.

Incentivized

• Scheduling module - we had initially expected this ERP system to handle the scheduling part for us, but it is not easy to do customization to the extent needed for us.
• Technical or the implementation team support can be improved, as it is not up to the standard.
• Not well suited for Engineer to Order / custom product manufacturing companies.

Incentivized

• Blue Cherry being so robust can be quite a bit to manage and really requires good training of users.
• Documentation is not the best due to the various possible configurations you can do with this system. It is difficult to document for all use cases.
• Consistency throughout the product as far as language used in different screens referring to the same item, but language can be customized so it can generally be made to match as needed.
• I think some really complete documentation on a few common use cases could be developed to help train users with properly formatted training sessions.
• Blue Cherry Add-Ons generally feel like they have not been well tested before being released and sold to their customers. We had issue (some major where we stopped using them) with pretty much every single add-on we have purchased, from B2b eComm, Shopify connector, CSC (Collaborative Supply Chain), NuOrder connector as some major examples.

Incentivized

I give this rating because CGS has a 'by design' policy meaning that if the product has been functioning a specific way for some time....even if that functionality is buggy or simply incorrect...they will call that 'by design' meaning you need to have a MOD (modification) done which means you need to pay for it. They generally seem to start between $5,000 to $15,000 USD even for a simple change like the length of a field that does not match from one screen to another, or adding a simple column to a table which contains a calculated value meaning it does not need to be stored in the database.

Incentivized

Materials module in Encompix ERP is more robust over the Abas ERP. We had previously used Abas before Encompix, and the reports are more robust in Encompix, and custom reports were possible. Bill of Materials can be uploaded in Encompix, unlike Abas. Item Masters feature was available. Vendor cross reference and performance tracking are some good features as well.

Incentivized

• We had to spend lot of time and effort in making it work for our company.
• Scheduling still needs to be fixed, we are trying beta version of the system now.

Incentivized

• Blue Cherry has been part of helping our company to grow 600%+ over the last 10 years and is able to handle the ever-increasing slope of that upward scaling growth we continue to see.
• Blue Cherry PLM has really helped the design team to work much better with the ERP as it is integrated.
• Reporting and inquiries have been very important to many teams, in particular, the planning & support team to really manage large wholesale customers well.

Incentivized