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

For our small hospital, the cost of the operation is a great value. Like any EHR, there are going to be limitations. Our hospital is not part of a larger health system, so did not have the pressure of spending more money to have a system which fed into a larger organization, so it works for us in this capacity. With so many hospitals jumping on EHRs like Epic and Oracle, it seems like this has only increased the overall cost of healthcare. [...] does also have a great revenue cycle component to it that expands across other EHRs. In the past, Thrive Technologies was a all encompassing system, but like most has a separate payroll system and now separate GL that you could also add. This is indicative of the software in general for healthcare unfortunately.

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

Depending on what subsystem, I think some work much better than others. For example on the patient accounting side, it is fairly easy to use, but does require a couple extra keystrokes. On the clinical side, I have heard similar statements. On the financial/accounts payable side, it is easier to use, while there are scenarios in which it would be nice to have a few more features.

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

Thrive Technologies is significantly more cost effective than the others, while it does lack some of the features (bells and whistles). Most of our neighboring hospitals are using these other systems, which does make it is tough to connect to them, as it seems like these larger systems have a juggernaut on the market and the costs of these is only increasing.

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