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The Brightest Pearl has made us shine!
March 04, 2016

The Brightest Pearl has made us shine!

Dan Thomas | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Brightpearl

The implementation of this in our company did cause us a lot of problems to begin with, I do not think sufficient training was given to our staff for understanding some of its key features and a lot of it was guess work and playing around with it to find out its more intricate details and workings. I have had to produce "guides" at our office to show people how to use certain functions of the system to see how it works to our needs.
Support when called for is always fast and efficient I would have no complaints about the service as problems are fixed usually very quickly. Once a call has been placed the support team is usually very friendly and polite and offers their assistance when asked for. They are also very open and helpful when suggestions for improvements are made.
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.
  • Keeping track of customers and their vital information on their accounts.
  • Keeping track of a day/week/months worth of sales information in concise forms of graphs and tables.
  • Easy to use EPOS interface for quick shop sales.
  • Finding sales by branded or supplier is difficult.
  • System does go down from time to time and is buggy occasionally.
  • Email system does not always reach all recipients.
  • Our outgoing delivery system has been made into a much smoother operation.
  • Sales are easier to put on and trace at a later date.
  • Sales and refunds are not condensed and easily traceable.
Our previous system was known as 3EX and was a very out dated system from the 90's that was good but not very efficient and very difficult to navigate through. This system is a lot smoother to operate and after a few teething problems our issues were all resolved and we are very happy with the end result.
On a day to day basis for shop, telephone and service sales this system works very well and it is usually a smooth operation. When the system does go down it can cause massive problems as calls build up and our ability to process sales grinds to a halt. The "back section" EPOS is great if you need to put on quick sales in the shop and can be used on a tablet very well so you can walk around with a customer and add items to their order efficiently.

Using Brightpearl

17 - Our business uses Brightpearl to cover all of its functions. We use the EPOS system for small quick shop sales and the main ordering system to take telephone orders. We use it to clone these sales to purchase orders and refunded and send emails with invoice attachments to customers and POs to suppliers. We have linked it to Amazon and Ebay to boost sales and a Metapaks system for our warehouse staff to ship orders. Our accounting staff also use it for the books.
We have no in house staff as such who are able to provide support but have a general manager who is very aware of how the system works. This information is usually passed onto myself and our customer service manager who filters the information out as necessary. I have also constructed a set of "how to" guides to help people when processing orders and such.
  • Sales over the telephone
  • Shipping our stock to customer correctly
  • Keeping track of stock levels
  • We have been able to produce clear documentation regarding sales figures.
  • Sales have become easily traceable and we are now able to split and drop ship orders directly from suppliers.
  • Setting up customer accounts with extra information such as VAT and credit accounts has been made possible.
  • We would like to be more mobile in the shop and warehouse premises so Brightpearl on a tablet is going to be something we will look into.
  • We would likely be able to access sales and accounts from home using the internet and our new Office365 portal.
  • We would like to be able to use the Brightpearl portal for other dealers to access our stock levels and pricing.
Brightpearl is a very simple system to use and we are able to be a lot more efficient than we previously were. I would like to keep the contract to enable us to keep things running smoothly and the support for this system is very concise and helpful when it is needed. There is also a lot of potential for it to expand and become more efficient.

Evaluating Brightpearl and Competitors

Yes - We replaced 3EX our older DOS based system which was extremely old and out date and was not sufficient for what we were trying to use it for.

Brightpearl was a much more modern and up to date system with newer key features that we were missing form our old system.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
The most important factor is usability. We have some staff members who are not very computer literate and easy to use systems that do not require a lot of knowledge to use are essential in our business. It also makes for faster and more efficient customer service and getting sales out is imperative as our main focus is telephone sales and online orders.
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.

Brightpearl Implementation

  • Implemented in-house
Change management was a major issue with the implementation - Implementing this system through our whole company was a major upheaval and revamp for us as a company and there various issues we encountered first off with telephone sales and online sales. We had to have to get together as a team and dig into get the understanding but we are now on top of it and it runs very smoothly.
  • Not sending out orders due to incorrect shipping status.
  • Invoicing sales that were not supposed to be invoiced.
  • Searching for products with similar codes in the drop down menus is very difficult.

Brightpearl Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
No in house training was given.
The online training was very helpful in the areas we were shown and was implemented very well via a Skype call and an presentation done via the internet. However it was not thorough enough for all of our needs in certain areas. More training in person on site would have been very helpful.
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.

Configuring Brightpearl

Brightpearl was easy to manipulate to suit our needs although some procedures we had to come up with ourselves. We have a service department and were able to add fields and in the invoices "fault detail" sections to inform customers what modifications were made to their products. It does however take a lot of time to re write these layouts.
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.
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface - We needed to change the interface so we could add extra information for returns, part exchanges and service repairs. These were completed fairly quickly although I cannot testify how this was done in house, it all works very well however, now that these changes have been made.
No - we have not done any custom code
Brightpearl added several different "sales type" options to us which allows us to search for different sales types more efficiently and quickly.

Brightpearl Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Yes - As we are a fast paced business we require a fast turn around time on sales and if we are unable to process things using Brightpearl we quickly fall out of step and this becomes difficult to catch up on. Premium support provides us with the ability to keep on top of these issues.
Yes - We have reported a few bugs with Brightpearl over the time we have used it, these bugs are usually fixed effectively and efficiently by the support team. However we do always need to call and ask for assistance with this it is not something that is looked at from the support side before our calls and we cannot resolve it ourselves.
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.

Using Brightpearl

Brightpearl can be a little confusing to begin with, there are a lot of options to look through and working out the intricacies takes some time depending on what you would like to be able to do on it and what your account is set up to do. It is however very thorough and once you can work your way around it most of the functions are fairly simple to use and very detailed.
ProsCons
Like to use
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Lots to learn
  • Customer sales are very easy to put on.
  • End of day cashing up is very easy to use and produce documentation for.
  • Cloning sales to purchase orders or refunds is very easy and smooth although copying notes across takes time.
  • Selecting different warehouses for the same order is not possible ie if stock is taken from the main warehouse and showroom it must be on two separate orders
  • Searching through sales and reports is a bit confusing at times
  • Searching for customers is difficult without at least two pieces of information, postcode and name.
Yes, but I don't use it

Brightpearl Reliability

Brightpearl works fairly well under high stress conditions, we can have multiple people using the system at once in several different ways and this allows us to complete all of the running of the business smoothly. Sales can be put into the system while the despatch team prepares the goods to be sent out, and the accountants check and process payments while management sees to ordering in new stock swiftly.
Brightpearl is always easily accessibly anywhere that you can find an internet source. I have checked our stock levels when we have been off site at Ham Rally's at home and on my way home or to work if needs be. That is probably one of the best features of this system.
Brightpearl performs very well and integrates very well with our Metapak packing and despatch system. IT also intergrates very well with Amazon and we have used Ebay although there have been complications with Ebay and stock levels. We use Ebay mostly for second hand items of which we only have one so have skipped using Brighpearl for these products.

Integrating Brightpearl

There were some teething problems when first integrating these systems and we did suffer heavily for a long time using Ebay but once they work these systems worked very well together.
  • Ebay
  • Amazon
  • Metapak
  • Sage Pay
All of these are core programs we need to run the business and all were integrated very smoothly with the exception of Ebay that we had some issues with in terms of controlling stock and linking the stock on Ebay to the stock on Brightpearl.
  • No
No
  • File import/export
No

Relationship with Brightpearl

This was a very simple sales process, there were a few meetings to discuss how we would go about using and getting this system and the payment went smoothly and we are happy with the levels of service we receive currently.
We have had no problems getting in touch with our vendor and they have been able to provide us with the adequate assistance we need post sale.

Upgrading Brightpearl

  • The Sage Pay functions works a lot more smoothly
  • Shipping status options are more easily noticeable
  • Less bugs and glitches when signing in.