Inventory Planner Reviews

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

It mostly does what it needs to, except when it doesnt.

Cons

My biggest gripe is with the customer support. It's simply not designed to be able to manage wide scale issues with their system. They have no direct phone number to call, and their chat system is a queue, meaning they get to you when they get to you. This isnt such a big issue with small problems with single accounts, but when they have a system issue effecting many accounts it means replies take days...and those replies are short and terse without offering any resolution. Right now the system has been an issue for about 1 week. Their "resolution" to the wide-spread issue was to move to a restore point from many days before the problem occurred. This means all the data that was input in the interim is missing. This means I have 15 missing POs. This means my inventory check-in from the past however many days is no longer accurate. These problems will persist for months as we discover them. The reply from their support....what reply? We are looking at other systems for management because we cannot operate a business like this.

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...)

Pros

VERY customizable, integration is easy, slick UI, receptive customer service and dev team, accurate forecasts, great suggestions, lots of supplementary information available in FAQs/webinars/youtube videos.

Cons

Sometimes settings take some digging to find, or in a few cases I had to ask customer service is something is possible - it almost always is, and it's always something I overlooked or didn't know existed until I asked.

Pros

Inventory, Reorder, optimize inventory and many more features are most important. With Inventory planner I found it very easy and useful.

Cons

For me it feels every features are useful, some things like stock summary and reorder are the things can be unused

Pros

ease of use and replenishment makes it easy to understand what's happening with product.

Cons

doesn't show contribution cost on each channel

Pros

It’s speed. It calculates everything so fast and handles 30k Products and 3 locations with absolute ease.

Cons

I want all the fields / filter options available across all sections sometime I can’t quite tweak the reports to a very granular level.

Pros

The integrations are great and easy to connect. It is easy to update the forecasting method used. The customer support is very quick and effective.

Cons

It takes a time to get used to the software. Like any forecasting tool, you need to use your business knowledge alongside the tool. It is not a negative, it is just the reality.

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

Easy to navigate and to integrate with our Omni-channel management software.

Cons

Some things can be over whelming with all the data provided.

Pros

The onboarding and patience of [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] and the team has been second to none. They invested time into understanding our issues and find solutions for the complexity encountered in our business. The software is good value for money as we have limited time to spend on forecasting, IP helps us keep us in check and identify OOS risks. It also helps us forecast demand across multiple warehouses which are fed from our main warehouse. It's a good bolt on for anyone using Unleashed inventory software.

Cons

It can be a bit slow at refreshing but this is a minor issue!

Pros

- daily emails give insight into out of stock and low stock items, makes it easy to react to conditions. Emails are highly customizeable to narrow into what you want to see.
- incredible reporting tool, lots of insights and factors you can add into reports (such as taking into account sales and holidays and how that impacts demand numbers)
- great way to narrow down and analyze individual skus, sales history and forecasting
- integrated seamlessly with Magento

Cons

- daily emails can be off by a day. Tried working with customer support on this (for example, item was out of stock, came back in, is up and available on website, but daily email the next day still shows it out of stock). Customer support unable to fix, created more work having to look into individual skus.

Pros

Replenishment and Open to Buy allow a great amount of user input to tailor results to the business.

Cons

Open to Buy should allow re-ordering of the display of product categories.

Pros

Super easy to use and just plain fun! I like the way it tracks bundles and assembles, and lets me know how much to stock of each component

Cons

I didn't find it sooner! This seriously makes me look like I know what I'm doing :)

Pros

How quickly the system calculates the formulas, makes replenishment easy and when you do have a questions they are super fast to help you out.

Cons

Sometimes I wish they had more trainings and a way to make transfer more simple between store locations

Pros

Easy to use and to see past sales and inventory on hand helps us order for the future.

Cons

When migrating over from one platform to the next we lost our sales history, but thankfully IP was able to assist and we did get it from another channel.

Pros

The amount of useful features! It's a great tool for Inventory Management and analysis.

Cons

I thought that during the implementation phase we would have a contact person to have a call with in case of an issue. Our assigned project manager was very slow in responding and not really helpful in fixing certain issues. So I think the implementation phase is a bit overpriced. However, the Customer Support team is very helpful and can be contacted via mail or chat.

Pros

Helps us plan what to buy and keep track of old stock

Cons

Can be a bit complex for our needs
It has a lot of features we don't use

Pros

- flexible forecasting methods (great for our seasonal sales)
- it allows us to override the default forecasts with manual inputs in a simple way, while still reminding you about the default forecast
- keeping track of our Purchase Orders thanks to some extra fields (compared to Quickbooks Commerce)
- great complementary product to Quickbooks Commerce - it syncs the POs and sales very well
- offers important information about forecasted revenue for our cash flow

Cons

- syncing with Quickbooks Commerce is not live (it syncs every few hours). However, this has proben not to be a real problem
- the interface seems dauting, at first, because there is so many data displayed. Once you get more familiar with all types of data displayed, everything becomes easier to understand

Pros

Ease of selecting vendors to stock up from and the amounts shown.

Cons

It seems to have all features needed for what we do.

Pros

The abilty to set stocking parameters by groups and or individual items is a must in tracking stock.

Cons

We build prudcts internally to make another product for sale. Would like to be able to generate an internal build/assembely order, as opposed to an externall purchase order.

Pros

Really easy to use and really fast to implement, you can start to forecast your first orders in less than 2 hours.
Some issues on our side with the API but quickly solved

Cons

Some automations could be added but this is not a really cons as the software is already working like a charm

Pros

Integration with Brightpearl - products and purchase orders flow very well between systems - love the overstock report and easy to use filter

Cons

Learning about the different forecasting algorithms takes time - but this is the same for all forecasting systems