Inventory Planner

Pros

* Easy to get started, although takes some work to set it as needed
* Excellent API for automating works flows
* Pricing and automated price reduction when your stocked items falls
* Summary level and detail drill downs allow questions to be answered and reviewed in one place
* First rate suppport team

Cons

* Company has grown quickly and there have been occasional bugs or issues that have impact on availability
* reconciling invoices against POs is tricky as there are not enough "extra charges" boxes and no way to reconcile multiple invoices against a single unless you keep a separate record outside of IP

Pros

The ease of navigating your entire inventory picture is hard to beat. They've done a great job with all relevant info at your fingertips and with lots of customizability on what info to show, and pop-ups with other critical info to condense a lot of information in a compact area. Just one example is the Demand Planning capability: It allows you to see at a glance whether you've had stock-outs of a product in the last X months, how many units per month you've sold, incorporates that into a forecast, but then also allows you to simply see that info and make your own determination for demand.

In that same Replenishment area of the product, you can see shipments you have on the way and when they're scheduled to arrive, how many days/months of stock you have and PO cover ordered, etc...It will even take into account how much you're going to lose in sales dollars per day if you stock out.

All of this integration with BrightPearl is excellent. We haven't even scratched the surface of the reporting features yet, but they are plentiful. Support has also been excellent and they've added features we needed based on our feedback.

Cons

Purchase orders could use a bit more customizability. A few more custom fields so that we can add extra info on line-by-line basis as needed would be great.

Pros

When it works it makes purchasing straightforward. The forecasting aspect works fine. It's easy to import and export purchase orders.

Cons

There are frequent periods where Inventory Planner does not sync with Shopify. At these point the system is rendered useless as data is not up to date so purchasing cannot be done without taking a huge gamble.

There are periods where there is zero functionality - usually when the sync is not working. Here nothing whatsoever will correctly load.

It is as if they don't have enough AWS server capacity to deal with data and it backs up all the requests from their clients, freezing it for everyone.

When there are extended periods of downtime there is a risk of data loss through syncs failing.

Customer support is barely interested. Brief replies with no real care or concern of the business impact of the problems they are causing. For the high price paid we expect fast responses from people that resolve things.

There are other annoyances e.g. it is not possible to merge multiple purchase orders from one supplier.

Pros

It is very fast, never having to wait around for it to load up and recompute constantly. It syncs all the data in the background every few hours which means rapid use.
The forecasting is top notch and takes into account so many variables, seasonality, vendor/product growth and much more and then simply advises you the amount to order. Again based on minimum order quanties, carton quantities, pack sizes etc. This makes for easier ordering and our suppliers appreciate our Purchase Orders matching their systems.
Inventory Planner also integrates seemlessly to a ton of different systems which we also use and makes it very fast and easy to use for the whole team.
You can also export orders and data very fast to excel/csv, we can pull data from tens of thousands of products with all their forecast data from inventory planner to excel in less than ten seconds.

Cons

Nothing! Genuinely nothing at all, just wish I had found it sooner.

Pros

Integration was a breeze with Zoho
Easy data loading process via flat-file too
Outstanding customer support
Decent user interface and very powerful search mechanisms

Cons

Could have nicer graphics
Not being able to trigger data synchronization
Posibility to customize the solution (my company logo, etc...)