Brightpearl

Our company is broadly divided into 4 departments and Brightpearl (BP) is used by all of these to perform their tasks as detailed below:

• As a database of suppliers and products are on BP, purchase orders are prepared and emailed to suppliers by the purchasing department based in London, who also do inventory management on BP.

• Goods are GRN'd on receipt by the warehouse team based in Norfolk. They pick and pack orders from BP once processed.
• Customer service (CS) department is based abroad and processes orders from multiple sales channels like Ebay and Amazon (fully integrated), wholesale, web site and phone orders. CS also deals with post and pre-sales issues as BP has a full time line and customers database.
  
• Accounts department reconciles payments, manages credit control, prepares accounts and VAT returns.
• Finally the management team has access to all the above activities via various report to keep control and evaluate performances of the entire team.

Brightpearl has revolutionised how we generate quotes, place orders and invoice within MJ Visual. The quotation procedure is now straightforward with minimal effort. Invoicing is also very straightforward too. No guesswork is needed now as all the "special" pricing information is on the system and you don't have to rely on one experienced individual any more. You have accurate pricing, simple templates, easy to operate software, significant savings in time and customers surprised at the turnaround time of a quotation. It has had the added benefit of making our employees understand our business better and become more involved in it too.

At CGPhones there are at least 15 employees who use Brightpearl. I personally use Brightpearl to process returns. I search the name of the customer in sales, then I find their order number and open the order. I then check off the purchases that the customer is returning and clone them to sales credits. Then I check the cost to make sure it's correct, save it, credit the customer and accept the product back into inventory. Sometimes I may start a new line and accept the product back into PTG so that it can be checked and repaired before being placed back into active inventory. I also use it to look up contact information for customers; either addresses if I need to request a prepaid shipping label from the shipping department or the phone number and email if I need to send contact info to one of our wholesale representatives or email a customer myself. I also use it to allocate products for an order when someone sends back a return and wants a replacement. The sales department uses it to allocate products for large orders. The inventory department uses it to accept in the inventory. In addition, it is connected to our eBay account so that when a customer places an order, the product is automatically allocated under their name with their contact info. The issues that we have with brightpearl are that it doesn't always save the bin number or cost when we are changing the information for a product. It doesn't always allocate products which means sometimes we oversell. And if you try to search for a name and it is slightly misspelled or you need to include a middle name, you receive no results. One of the major issues we have is that we can't find a way to figure out how much credit a wholesale customer currently has in their account. Those are all of the current issues I can think of that would helpful if they were addressed.

We use Shopify for our back-end inventory solution and integrate with Shopify for web sales and Shipstation for shipping. It used by one department that needs it the most. We were going to manage all department merchandise inventory with one system, but there have been serious issues with Brightpearl for us, and the way that Sales assured us would work for us did not turn out to be true, so we halted our org-wide implementation.

Brightpearl is used in our business on a multitude of levels, for keeping track of stock, adding customers to a database through which we can contact with information from our newsletter. We also use it to add sales onto those customers' accounts, produce refunds or credits and is very handy for keeping track of which customers have special allowances, i.e. not tax or credit limits on their accounts.
We have a service repair centre and have customized the sales section of Brightpearl to allow us to produce documentation with specified areas to allow information regarding these repairs to be added.

We can send shipping documentation as well via email to customers directly and this system has been integrated with our website and Amazon and Ebay accounts to allow for a multitude of selling platforms.

Our selection process would involve a bit more training and hopefully face to face interaction with some support staff as we were not fully prepared for the installation of this system. On site help in all areas of the business would have been a great help in efficiently running the business with this software.

If you are fairly computer literate certain parts of the system are very easy to get to grips with, placing orders on EPOS is very simple. However, there are other aspects where you have to dig around a little more to work out how things work and certain procedures need to be adhered to in order for things to work properly.

I am not currently involved in this procedure but it does seem that changes to invoice layouts can be difficult to produce. The support staff have been very helpful with changes we are unable to perform ourselves though so this has helped greatly.

Brightpearl added several different "sales type" options to us which allows us to search for different sales types more efficiently and quickly.

We have issues logging in, the system would continuously log us out after the log in page. After calling the support team and speaking to a member of staff our call was taken in a polite and pleasant manner and the issue was resolved within 5 minutes of the call.

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