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 For small and medium business in the distribution and light manufacturing space, Sage 100 is probably the best bang for your buck. As a very scaleable system, you can modify the system to meet the needs of a growing business without making gross changes to the core of the system
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 Simple to implement and use. Operation very intuitive so new employees are quickly trained. It is very flexible with many modules and many features allows for easy customization to suit particular needs of any department or company. Context sensitive help, training and support make it easy for a company to operate with out a lot of additional outside tech support. Scalable plenty of room to grow as the business grows without being bloated. Pricing is very reasonable. 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 It's painfully slow even for mid-sized businesses like ours without millions of transactions. It crashes very, very often and has numerous critical failures. Unfortunately, it's a local program so that excludes it from being used remotely. You have to be on site for it to work. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I would put this out to bid, if I were at the same organization. There have been a lot of improvements and changes in enterprise software and my preference would be to find a good web-based or cloud-based tool. Lower overall cost of ownership and improved efficiency would be my target criteria for a rebid of this.
Read full review Usability It is easy, flexible, user friendly and feature laden. Out of the box or easily customized to meet our "wish" list . Sage offers a variety of modules and bolt-ons, user defined fields etc., allowing us to conduct business "our way" without forcing us into a one-size- fits- none mold or having to purchase expensive and cumbersome programming modifications
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 Sage Support is very good. I usually get a person on the phone in a short time frame and usually get my issues fixed in one called.
Read full review Implementation Rating We had an advantage in implementing the tool in that our director of Ops had been part of the team implementing the ERP for other users so we knew what to expect and were able to avoid a lot of the challenges people sometimes face with implementations. However, the process still took far longer than desired.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I've reviewed Accpac, Syspro, SAP Business 1 and Platinum. Sage is far easier to use and setup than Syspro and SAP Business 1. Generally speaking, most accounting software does the same thing, at the end of the day, how easy is it to modify data inside the system and review to make sure that your system integrity is intact. I find that Sage 100 is excellent at these things.
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 We have seen increased efficiencies for our team members processing orders and fulfillment as they are now integrated. We have cut paper/printing/mail expenses by 500% of what we previously spent. Our overall cash management has improved with the visibility from Bank Reconciliation and Financial Reporting. Read full review ScreenShots Sage 100cloud Screenshots