Blue Yonder Luminate Logistics vs. Fishbowl Inventory

The size and scope of the operation is the main question. In a smaller environment, or one that does not require a complex Warehouse Management Solution (WMS), RedPrairie may not be a good fit.

Incentivized

Fishbowl is well suited for warehouse operations because you can control, monitor, report or view the progress of materials all the way from purchasing and receiving to the shipment and tracking of products. It integrates with major carriers and with QuickBooks so it does offer a suite that can support the entire operation. It allows for workflow monitoring, so particular groups or products can be tracked.

Incentivized

• Cycle counting--great feature for inventory accuracy.
• System directed put-away--system directs driver where to store and put materials away, keeps a warehouse in tip-top shape.
• CNZ-Count near Zero, actually set at count at zero, when a bayrow emtys out, prompts fork driver to verify that the bayrow is actually empty by doing a cycle count....great for inventory accuracy!

Incentivized

• Inventory control - provides easy/accurate reports. Also, cycle counts can be done at any time. The warehouse team was easily trained.
• Sales Orders - Fishbowl allowed us to have the sales orders accessible to everyone and linked the customers' purchase order to the orders and work orders (within the system). It no longer needs to be manually linked.
• Custom reports - for a small fee we had reports customized specifically for our company.
• Link to Quickbooks - invoices generated directly after closure of sales order.

Incentivized

• Their implementation team was unable to provide examples where they successfully executed large scale multi site global deployments. May require strong client team or 3rd party implementation firm to ensure successful deployment and results.
• As of 3 years ago, their parcel shipping module was very new and unproven in marketplace.
• As of 3 years ago, Red Prairie had limited offering in modules that complement the WMS such as trading partner management and distributed order management. If you truly just need warehouse management capabilities this might not matter. For us, this meant we would need to involve more solution providers or internal development to address supply chain initiatives.

Incentivized

• MRP
• BOM creation
• Unified interface

Incentivized

Again, the product was good. Customer service was OK at best. For any new installations or upgrades, I would seek a third party servicer/installer who would be more flexible in contract negotiations and provide service guarantees beyond what could expected with RedPrairie itself. If you choose to deal with RedPrairie directly, prepare for a lengthy negotiation process.

Incentivized

I found RedPraire to be the best system I have used of the years.

Incentivized

Originally the support for Fishbowl was very poor. It was hard to get anyone to help. In the last 12 - 14 months, it has greatly improved and if it continues this way I would certainly rate it higher.

Incentivized

RedPrarie seems to have been better than Aloha. I will say that I used Aloha a very long time ago and it is probably light years ahead now. Aloha seemed to be a little more flexible in what you could do. The major downfall was you had a system that needed to be connected to the POS network directly on site that would be used only for reporting. This would require you to have another PC for computing needs. Like I said before, this is probably something that has changed in the newer world of Aloha.

Incentivized

Fishbowl is more useful than QuickBooks Manufacturing if you operate complex manufacturing with multiple multi layered BOMS

Incentivized

• Warehousing errors were reduced by almost 12% with Blue Yonder Luminate Logistics.
• Order processing was done at more than 7% of the average TAT with the use of this service.
• End-user & ops team had higher productivity by almost 15% after integrating the service in day-to-day activities.

Incentivized

• Positive: Decreased time spent on copy/pasting in spreadsheets.
• Positive: Easier to analyze costs and guarantee efficiency.
• Negative: Time to get it up and running is really difficult to work with.

Incentivized