JobBOSS as an ERP

Overall we like the product and have good results with the support teams.

Pros

JobBOSS as a standalone is good, with some nice Crystal Reports added on. What makes it great is that there are quite a few add-ons available (for Quality, CRM, etc.) , plus it it stores all of its data in a SQL format that works well with Microsoft products.

Cons

I work mostly in the Finance/Accounting side of the business. There are some basic things that could be added in the next version upgrades.

Exact JobBOSS review

Good Service generally and helpful on custom apps. We have done a bunch of them!

Pros

Good first level entry product. Lots of options for expansion. Priced well. works well for most of what we do

Cons

Could be easier to use. Search in fields could search the whole field instead of just in order. Need ability to reschedule batches of jobs or ops. Looking in the future to need better paperless abilities for the floor. This would be drawings, capacity dashboards. Also as things become more connected we are going to need ability to integrate to nesting

Entry level manufacturing software for shops willing to change to fit their ERP

It's not that our sales volume has outgrown JobBoss, but our processes have. The lack of flexibility and customization are forcing us to work outside of JobBoss (e.g. custom software). The more that happens, the more obvious it is that JobBoss isn't right for us. I always consider JobBoss as a first source for our processes. Most of the time it can do something similar to what we want, but we would have to make serious concessions to make it fit. Ps. Stop sending "Important JobBoss Updates" that are primarily selling custom utilities.

Pros

In general, it's easy to use. Each module has similar buttons and interfaces. I think the AR/AP modules work well since it's not the primary focus of the software.

Cons

Quote entry has extremely limited ability to adjust margins (it can do it, but it's not easy). Adjusting margins are key for job shop environments. After speaking with support about my needs, they told me to quote outside of the system. Which means, I was literally told not to use your product. Legacy fields get stuck in the system. There's a lot of clutter in our system because we need to change user defined fields but they're not available in the find/replace utility. Scheduler is very poor. Difficult to use, glitchy. Doesn't (automatically) schedule for available labor resources, which is a huge part of a job shop environment. Reviewing scheduling during quoting doesn't account for current back load (or didn't at the time we last considered it). The recent "facelift" was atrocious. It's actually a huge deterrent to updating versions. What benefit is this facelift to me? My perception is that there will be no feature additions to the core product. Any improvements come in the form of custom utilities with additional cost.

JobBoss - Simple enough but still lots of horsepower for a smaller job shop

I came on board with my employer in October 2014. They had been using JobBoss for over 10 years. With my ERP background, I quickly discovered that my employer wasn't taking advantage of many of the available utilities, including the Scheduling module. Within 3 months I had all 30 of our machining centers, plus all of the secondary resources and operations, set up and testing completed. Routings were stripped back and rebuilt with proper resource requirement setups to ensure proper scheduling of work and proper timing and load representation. Shift and holiday calendars were constructed properly. We turned on Scheduling in February 2015. With the first pass of the global scheduler (running infinite loading and allowing schedules in the past) we came out with a past-due backlog of some 4000 hours. After updating job progress on about 150 jobs, realigning a few things and making some setup tweaks, we realized that we were still over 2000 hours past due. However, we now had the theoretical start and end dates to work with, we could time materials properly, and could graph our loads to see what we were doing to ourselves with our booking practices. Since then, we have improved our utility of the system across the board. Raw material and finished goods inventories are accurate, so we can now use the Material Planning functionality. Raw material issues due to planning are non-existent. PO's for outside processing are now accurately priced, timed, and generated straight from the job routing. Use of Picks, Transfers, and Extra Quantities have given our inventory transactions full transparency. I look forward to Unite 2017 when I can see hands-on what other companies are doing to tap this system's potential!

Pros

Simple navigation, use of Favourites shortcuts, level of complexity is perfect for smaller organizations.

Cons

Would like to be able to access more information directly from the Job (ie from an outside process, be able to access the Purchase Order that is linked to it).

Solid Product with good flexability

Our company has now used JobBOSS for around 4 years. We have found that the user interface is quite intuitive and straightforward to use. This is a plus when training new people on the system. Functionally, it has met most of the needs that we purchased it for. We loved the idea behind the scheduling module, but have found it to not be a good fit with our shop. We are primarily a custom high mix, low volume shop. This leads to many jobs that have potential to run in more than one pathway on the floor and most jobs are first run where we do not have a history of expected production run times to fall back on. We also have split our shop floor into three self directed production cells that have a fair amount of cross work. The self direction means many production decisions are made at the cell level and not at a command level. Because of these factors, we found that matching our shop floor to the scheduling module was exceptionally difficult unless we were willing to dedicate a full time person to keeping it accurate. In the end, we believe that the scheduling module would work better in a higher volume production environment with more of a top down command structure than how we operate. The reports that come with JobBOSS are reasonable, however, we have found that digging deeper into the data (at least the directions we looked) required special reporting. It is handy to have someone on staff who is comfortable working with SQL tables, data mining and creating custom reports. Exact does offer custom report creating. Just remember, it come at additional cost.

Pros

As someone who does look behind the scenes and works to dig data out of the system, I am impressed with the amount of information that JobBOSS does capture. Additionally, it is quite well organized in its structure. On the front end, the user interface is intuitive and lends itself to easy training.

Cons

Reporting. The stock reports are reasonable for a company that does not need to dig into its data very deeply. But the analysis at deeper levels would either require purchasing many custom reports or have someone on staff that can dig into the data and create custom reports. The scheduling module works best in an environment with minimal chance of perturbation. Systems that have a high degree of variation become hard to model accurately.