BlueCherry vs. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

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

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is well suited for inventory management in all aspects. Its accessibility, along with my other apps, when out of the office is unparalleled. I find it easy to work with on a desktop or laptop; however, it could use some work on a mobile device.

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

• Automate the creation of bills of materials for production. We can now generate a BoM from a sales order.
• Organization of all data pertaining to thousands of parts, assemblies, and finished goods. Engineering and purchasing have a common portal.
• We can create sales orders from quotations instead of re-entering them (this did require some bolt-on software). Less redundant work with fewer entry errors.
• Accounting can provide reports based on specific criteria stored in NAV. We can pull better and more detailed intelligence.

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

• Some functions could be a bit more user friendly, intuitive.
• Better migration from previous ERP software (especially other Microsoft products). "Growing pains" associated with change?! Maybe.
• A few redundancies and procedural missteps on menus and tabs can make the portal a bit crowded.

Incentivized

We've already decided to continue using this software. It is too expensive for us to upgrade so we made a workaround by using the virtual computer with Windows XP installed on it. We did research replacing this software, but it was a better financial decision to keep what we had instead

Incentivized

Best in terms of reporting or coming up with a great dashboard. Seamlessly collaborated with teams without depending on particular device as its web version is the buddy for people with work flexibility. Licensing price and integrations can be the areas of improvement and can simplify the interface which will be easy for a new user.

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

It provides one to efficiently be able to manage bookkeeping and inventory without much challenges. One can easily navigate through workflow processes while managing usages and budgets. Being able to produce reports in Word, Excel or PDF means one is able to have a working document to produce trends and graphs or produce pivot tables.

I have personally supported all of the Dynamic family of ERP systems and made the decision to concentrate on NAV as the solution of choice. From a support and development standpoint there are few if any packages that can compare. It is not uncommon for most of the companies that I support to only call me once or twice a month after the first year. This is due to the ease of tracking down problems and errors and the ability for a developer to provide the end-user with routines that automatically correct the most basic kind of error

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

• Automation processing, including EDI functionality, has increased employee efficiency and prevented the need for adding additional employees.
• Implementation of the warehouse functionality, including cycle counts, has resulted in better inventory control/less shrinkage.
• Implementation of e-Ship and e-Receive, has resulted in greater efficiency and order accuracy.

Incentivized