CGS’s BlueCherry Enterprise Suite has the built-in capacity to address the fundamental needs of all core management, planning, design and product development, sourcing, manufacturing, logistics and sales functions. With end-to-end capabilities, the BlueCherry Enterprise Suite enables consumer lifestyle products companies to manage critical business transactions and concept-to-consumer processes to improve speed to market, gain greater process visibility and control, increase productivity…
N/A
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (formerly Dynamics NAV) is one of the ERP products in the Dynamics family.
The technology is based on the Navision product acquired by Microsoft in 2002. This product is the best-selling Microsoft ERP platform, and is often used by companies in the manufacturing and distribution verticals.
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.
It addresses well some integration and connectivity issues with other software and adapted technologies: formulation and manufacturing batching software, scanners and bar codes, inventory, financials, emailing of invoices and statement, sales and purchasing... etc. I believe it to be better suited to a medium to large company. Not as simple and seamless as we expected for migrating from another Microsoft Dynamics software product (we moved from GP to NAV). Our staff is going through a tougher time than we thought to learn some procedures. Normal growing pains?!
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.
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.
The version of software that we currently use isn't compatible with Windows 7, therefore we had to install it using the virtual computer under Windows XP. This created a few additional steps that the users had to go through in order to access the software which generated more calls to our IT Helpdesk.
We did research how much it would cost to upgrade the software so that we could get a version compatible with Windows 7, but the cost was way too expensive for our organization. Also, when we need to make updates or changes to the software, there are very few consultants who are familiar with the software so we are limited in who we can use for consulting services. Since we are limited in choosing consultants who can make updates and changes to the software the fees are usually really expensive for their services.
There is a .zup file that we constantly have to delete in order for the database to work properly and update. Users get a pop-up about once a week asking if they want to replace the .zup file and if the file is not deleted then the opening page for the software will not show up correctly and the database will not have the most up to date information.
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
It has simplified all processes and reduces turnaround time for month end processes. You can easily navigate through the dashboard which is very user friendly and easily guides you to different functionalities. Duplications of Invoices is avoided because NAV rejects posting of an invoice number already in the system so you increase accuracy.
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.
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
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.