Fishbowl Inventory vs. Thrive Technologies

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

No solution is perfect, but I would say that Thrive is a particularly robust and complex solution that's intended to tackle major demand management and inventory forecasting problems. Smaller companies simply won't need a solution that's so all-encompassing. I would recommend waiting unitl you know that you need it before moving forward with a solution like Thrive.

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

• Cloud-based, accurate forecasting system saves lots of time and can tangibly boosts ROI
• Robust demand management down to the SKU level
• Optimized replenishment prevents too much money from being tied up in inventory

Incentivized

• MRP
• BOM creation
• Unified interface

Incentivized

• Although it's simpler than many alternatives, it's a highly complex system and at times we felt lost during the transition period.
• We didn't get the results we had imagined when looking at their case studies and marketing materials. I understand many factors go into those things, and their case studies are not necessarily indicative of typical results, but your mileage may vary.
• Inventory replenishment alerts about potential stockouts weren't always reliable.

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

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

Incentivized

Abas ERP was what we had used previously, and though it did its job adequately, it lacked the forecasting, demand management, and inventory replenishment sophistication of Thrive. We reached a point where we felt it was untenable to supplement the previous system on our own which necessitated the switch to Thrive.

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

• We were able to reduce the amount of resources tied up in inventory
• Forecasting tools meant significantly less time spent trying to wrangle spreadsheets
• The transition was painful, causing initial doubts, but it was certainly worth the growing pains

Incentivized