Apprise ERP

Comentarios: Apprise is a great ERP system with a very wide footprint tailored for companies that sell into "big box" retailers. For the right company, you can use Apprise to manage: product development, forecasting, sourcing, EDI, sales orders, warehouse management, retailer chargebacks, customer allowances, financials, business intelligence, etc. While there may be other single-business-process systems that can do some of these better, you will be hard-pressed to find a packaged ERP system, for this price, that does all of these as well across the board.

Puntos a favor: If you sell into Walmart or any other EDI-heavy retailers, the EDI Transaction Manager will be of great benefit to your organization. Apprise offers a completely hands-off approach to EDI that allows your business to focus on managing the orders, not the vast amount of technical requirements to get that order from your retailer's system. Chargeback and allowance management features make for easy management of post-sales deductions. Supplier Production Monitoring provides visibility into constantly changing production and delivery dates so that you know when the product will arrive at your distribution center.

Contras: As with any ERP system with this wide of a footprint, implementation will depend heavily on having the right people in your organization participate in the implementation process. Your technical and business-user staff will play a big part in a successful go live. If you try to implement Apprise without the right expertise, you are setting your organization up for failure.

Puntos a favor: Apprise has modeled everything from purchasing, logistics, manufacturing, warehouse management, and accounting and packaged it all in an easy-to-use interface. As our company has grown, we've found that the capabilities of Apprise have been able to keep up and we're using features now that we never planned on using when we first went live. Apprise has a process for just about everything and if you follow the steps, you reap the rewards in terms of efficiency and visibility.

Contras: If your business is primarily B2C with a large customer list and very little operational complexity, this product may not be for you. Apprise's strengths lie in its flexibility in managing the areas of operations where things typically get murky. Think manufacturing or importing from foreign suppliers.

Puntos a favor: For our business model, DTC, with a high number of products offered and a huge list of customers, we needed a system that would connect all of our company together. The accounting, purchasing and warehouse modules sync perfectly allowing us to manage our efficiencies and focus on the bottom line. Overall our company has greatly advanced in terms of profitability through our partnership with Apprise.

Contras: The merchandising, product management and manufacturing processes are a bit more cumbersome than we would have expected. This is probably due to the changing focus of Apprise as they transition to a more DTC friendly system. Our hope is that the implementation of 8.0 will correct this and resolve this minor criticism of a great system.

Comentarios: Because of the more modern interface we are able to push more data to the users who need to make business decisions based on information in the ERP. In the past this was something IT had to be pulled into, now we can just point the users to the information and they can do it themselves.

Puntos a favor: WE liked the more modern interface compared to our old ERP of 15 years. The ability for users to pull data on their own and the number of functions is great. It can run across a WAN with very little latency.

Contras: The layout and function of the software is weak. The ability to see relevant help text and lead by example is non existent. TO much is still a manual process, they should have the ability to turn a switch for many processes that should be scheduled or just plain automatic.

Puntos a favor: Easy to use and train people. Strong customer support. Small enough, so they know their customers and specific needs. Staff is long-term and consistent.

Contras: Challenge to find staff who are familiar with this specific ERP and with Progress databases. Need to schedule upgrades well in advance as the team gets busy.