DEAR Inventory

Vantagens

As a cloud integration consultant working with SMEs in Adelaide and interstate to solve inventory management issues by implementing the right software, DEAR has proven again and again to be the leading choice for these businesses and is now our recommended choice as an implementation specialist.

DEAR has the functionality to provide a central solution to any SME looking to sell online or instore across a number of channels, and manage all the inventory in one place.The integration with Xero is top notch and the most robust I've seen of almost any app that connects to Xero.

The integrations to eCommerce channels are consistent in their setup and options and allow a great deal of flexibility. Complementing these integrations are shipping service integrations that allow for a full suite of inter-connected apps with DEAR as the hub.

Desvantagens

If I had a gripe, it would be around some minor inconsistencies within the UI across various parts of the software, as well as some minor inconsistencies with various reports that are available.

Vantagens

We transferred from Quickbooks to Dear Systems and it has been a great improvement. Our ability to manage inventory is far greater than before with QB. It's simple/easy to use, but also robust and has some very helpful features. We're in the wholesale industry. On the sales side - we love the pick, pack, and ship functions. This allows us to easily provide another level of detail for our customers that we couldn't before. We can enter what we packed on what pallet and then easily print pallet break downs and detailed packing lists. I also like the way you can mass pick, or mass print sales orders. The advance sale option is nice, so you can track back order shipments right on the same screen as the original order.
On the purchase order side, the advance receiving functions let you receive inventory against one PO more than once which is helpful.
We also just started keeping some inventory in another warehouse, so the ability to keep track of that through dear is nice.

Also the B2B portal has been a nice addition to our company as well.

Desvantagens

I think the reporting tab is pretty clunky, that might be what I like least about Dear. They're on the right track, and some of those reports are very helpful. It's just that I have to export them to excel and modify them quite a bit for them to be what I want them to be.
Also I think the "credit purchase order" and "credit sale note" functions are pretty confusing/complicated.

Vantagens

Contains the vast majority of required features to operate a successful e-commerce store. Nice layout, not too bulky, and sticks to what its good at. API is well written which allows you to expand usability with third party apps.

Desvantagens

Performance! Over the past 6 months this has gone from bad to worse. The odd hang, became frequent hangs, then time outs on the server. The latest sizeable price increase to allow them to fix this was unwelcome as I already pay for a package that is supposed to perform as promised. This left a little bit of a sour taste. Now though, once again, their system is down, completely!
My team cannot access anything, at all. If a call or email comes through, we cannot see stock, prices, lead times, not even the customer records.
Support say they are working on it, the ETA? Don't know. Great.
I say avoid until they sort out their issues with performance. I will be looking for alternatives as I cannot afford this kind of issue, and paying more for the service they are already supposed to be offering is bad form in my opinion.

Vantagens

Quite easy to implement
Syncs nicely with our current cloud based software
Interesting/complex reporting

Desvantagens

The over promising, and under delivering of the software. simply, it doesn't do what it claims!

The inventory is not live with Shopify (during launches there is always a lag, causing major headaches for our team and requires a lot of manual adjustments) - we were promised that based on our volume this would not happen, but it does. And it happens every month, for the past 18+ months

Inability to get the specialist help when we need it. We are always given help by a customer service member, not a technician, which slows down our ability to fix the problem. I understand that you need to protect the technicians time from dealing with simple problems, but we do not receive prompt service or the respect that we know what we are talking about!

We need a quicker escalation procedure to get help more urgently

Technicians only work from the afternoon (we are located in Melbourne) so when urgency issues crop up in the morning, we have to wait most of the working day to fix them

b2b portal is not very robust, we have had a lot of issues with this

the fixed provided by DEAR are not log term fixes, they don't fix the root of the problem, but fix it for the moment, but then issues crop up again and we are in the same position.

Vantagens

The sales, production and purchasing modules provide an excellent integrated platform for our manufacturing operations. We stock over 300 chemicals to make hundreds of rubber compounds that we use in production of custom rubber products and Dear keeps the complexity under control. I love the continual upgrades on the cloud and the easy access from anywhere. Finally, the standard interface is good but the API lets us implement solutions to meet specific needs at various points in our production.

Desvantagens

While the technical support is excellent I find I occasionally need to reach out to them because the online documentation is not well organized.

The reporting module is adequate but often requires off-line processing to get the results you are looking for. They make that easy with excel exporting but it is impossible to create a report that is self-explanatory. For example, you can build complex filters to get specific results but you can not re-title the generic report with a specific name, or include the filter values to explain your data.

I also wish the date fields would accept time information so that we could capture real-time production data in the system--at the moment you can only enter a start and stop date when you create finished goods.