Blue Cherry is Powerful, Scalable, Flexible and Adaptable To Your Organization's Needs
Rating: 7 out of 10
July 25, 2022
MB
Vetted Review
Verified User
10 years of experience
We use Blue Cherry in various aspects. Primarily, we implemented it as our ERP system to handle Production and sales orders, invoicing, advanced ship notifications, EDI communications, and various other tasks based around operating an apparel business. We have since implemented B2B eCommerce, collaborative supply chain to work with factories and vendors, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management, which is really an odd way of saying our apparel design management). Blue Cherry is used across the organization in all departments from New Development to Technical Design, Planning & Support, Accounting, and Warehouse. Executives also use it for various reports and BI data.
- 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.
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.
- ERP to manage production, allocation and sales.
- PLM to help designers and tech dev manage designs, spec packs, and data being sent to factories for product design.
- Warehouse and Accounting management including pick and pack, shipment, invoicing and ASN, returns, reporting.
- Collaborative supply chain management is extremely important, but since we started trying to implement it 5+ years ago, constant issues have thwarted us from being able to do so.
- 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.
NetSuite, Aptian
Do they have premium support? I complain about support often but I never hear anything about premium support being available as an option...
Yes
I have reported MANY bugs over the last 11 years. They are rarely resolved in a timely fashion and often CGS calls them 'by design' so they can then ask you to pay to fix the issue.
This part of customer support is the biggest thorn in the foot for me....otherwise if they ramped up their support to be top notch and made their products consistent from screen to screen, and addressed bus as bugs in a timely fashion as well as improved documentation...I think they could rule the market. But sadly the do not seem to be willing to invest the money to make this happen and instead seem to find ways to try to pull money out of (I can only speak for my experience) their customers.
This part of customer support is the biggest thorn in the foot for me....otherwise if they ramped up their support to be top notch and made their products consistent from screen to screen, and addressed bus as bugs in a timely fashion as well as improved documentation...I think they could rule the market. But sadly the do not seem to be willing to invest the money to make this happen and instead seem to find ways to try to pull money out of (I can only speak for my experience) their customers.
I can not think of a single specific time when I felt like CGS provided exceptional support specifically, other than the customer success person Carly who does her best to try to get us the assistance we require, and Brian in sales who is amazing and really does try to support us the same way and Michael B. our project manager for Blue Cherry who has been a life saver in many instances and really tries to help us as much as he can. Others I have had good and bad experiences with.