Blue Cherry is Powerful, Scalable, Flexible and Adaptable To Your Organization's Needs
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
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.
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.
Most Important Features
- 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.
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.
Other Software Used
Shopify Plus, NuORDER, Microsoft Power BI
