Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Good for distribution organizations with warehousing. Can also support both Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable, although a more thorough Accounting package is recommended. Is strong when it comes to integrating bar codes and scanners, particularly for warehouse maintenance. Prophet 21 does include a basic CRM offering. However, it is very basic, and for any real Customer Resource management, a third-party tool is best (even recommended by Epicor.)
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review The system allows us to pretty much design it to work the way want it to work. It is a very flexible system for the most part. The system doesn't let you make too many shortcuts with getting something processed. It forces you to go through the proper steps. The system keeps track of everything and can be easily retrieved through history searches. Detailed reports, graphs, .... Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Prophet 21 could use better management tools for its own data. The database has a tendency to bloat and over time can grow exceedingly large without administrative intervention. The UI can be cluttered at times and the windows tend to jump into focus or drop from focus when it isn't expected causing user confusion and data entry errors. Branding on forms and the UI is almost nonexistent. Customizations of screen aesthetics and form layout options should be easier and not require custom programming. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I've used Epicor Prophet 21 for about 12 years (in various iterations). It started out as CommerceCenter by Prophet 21 then became Prophet 21 by Activant and then Prophet 21 by Epicor. So frequently, when a software company is acquired, it stops being great. That has not been the case with Epicor Prophet 21. Over the years they've been under Epicor, the product has just gotten better and better, with major extensibility enhancements and new mobile components coming online.
Read full review Usability Overall, I love using Prophet 21. With a few rare exceptions, functions within the application have been streamlined so they can be used with as few clicks and key presses as possible. That's not to say they've given up any functionality. The platform is incredibly powerful; just easy to use.
Read full review Reliability and Availability When hosted locally, you don't have to worry about outages unless the power goes out and the battery backups fail. It can also be hosted in the cloud which is as reliable as your internet connection. There's really no concern for outages in the software by itself. Outages are controlled by external factors.
Read full review Performance I do feel like there are some screens and reports that could be streamlined. Prophet 21 likes to load features all at once when going into a program but a quicker load time into order entry, for example, is worth having a little latency while a non-essential tab that doesn't get used very often is opened.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review The support is some of the worst I've seen across all the 122 software vendors we work with. Everything is offshore and it is always vague answers, links to wiki's that don't apply, and when we pay for project support they charge $200 an hour for someone who works remote from Mexico to call you on a poor quality VoIP connection that isn't all that well trained and often doesn't have basic IT skills
Read full review In-Person Training The on-site training was great. I give it a 9 because the trainer was a chain smoker who had to excuse herself a lot to smoke. Kind of unprofessional. She was a very good trainer though.
Read full review Online Training I had a great time with the online training. Most of the online trainings were live which meant you had opportunity to interact with instructors. I liked trying to derail them by posting funny comments to the chat window. The only complaint I had about these is they weren't recorded for later use. Well, another complaint is that they were sometimes too short.
Read full review Implementation Rating The overall implementation is smooth. Prophet 21 sends someone on-site for as many days as you need them to step through the initial implementation. Data conversion is the biggest trick. Make sure you get help with that portion of implementation. Also, be sure to offer plenty of training incentives to keep people coming back for more training. A little money spent up front will save you tons of headaches later.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I have not looked at them in detail, but have received a lot of positive comments through out the industry, we're on the fence in regards to viability of cloud based solutions, but from the information we have received it seems like
NetSuite has developed a good solution for the industry.
Read full review Scalability Prophet 21 is very reliable. The database is robust and well designed. The application is also hard to break. If there's one feature I don't like, it's that they haven't accounted for the dreaded single quote. That's kind of the bane of Microsoft SQL's existence. They need to escape that character in every field that will accept it in the system. Otherwise, the system throws all kinds of errors and many times will crash.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review P21 has been very good with how we handle cash collections and had a positive impact for us. P21 user interface saves time and thus makes people more efficient by allowing customizations. With ordering, inventory, customer information, and CRM all in one location it makes the need for other programs like goldmine become obsolete. Read full review ScreenShots