Fishbowl Review
November 08, 2018
Fishbowl Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Fishbowl Manufacturing (FBM)
Fishbowl is used by the entire organization. It maintains our inventory and we use it for purchasing, entering sales orders and manufacturing orders. It ensures we have everything in one system and works with Quickbooks.
- 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.
- In some instances when the sales orders contain "non inventory items," it is difficult to split up these items (i.e. design contract items) once they have been put into the system. The work flow is not intuitive to know what needs to be backed out, etc. For example, if a sales order is placed with a contract for $1000 but the next day we need to bill out only $600 ($400 later) - the entire $1000 gets billed out and can't be retracted.
- Shipping memos/packing lists - the link between the Quickbooks invoice number would be nice.
- Adding files to the vendor/part area, so I don't need to go to our PLM system to get the files.
- Overall FBM has saved our company money. Our inventory is more accurate. Previously we used a home grown, Access data base. We have decreased our cost in the inventory/purchasing area by about 15%.
- Our parts are easier to track in the system - from sales order/purchasing/work order/inventory.
- Arena
Arena is very powerful and user friendly - but not an inventory control system - yet the bill of materials input far exceeds that of Fishbowl.
Fishbowl has improved in the 3 years we have had it. However, there are things with Fishbowl that are still difficult, ie. splitting an order once it has been input, (sometimes it works, other times we wonder what we did wrong). Once a manufacture order has been set it cannot be changed even if a part has to be changed (due to purchase issues), and sales orders don't seem to allow "down payments" - or if it does, it is not easily understood.
Fishbowl is far better than our previous Access database system. Tracking parts is much easier.
Fishbowl has improved in the 3 years we have had it. However, there are things with Fishbowl that are still difficult, ie. splitting an order once it has been input, (sometimes it works, other times we wonder what we did wrong). Once a manufacture order has been set it cannot be changed even if a part has to be changed (due to purchase issues), and sales orders don't seem to allow "down payments" - or if it does, it is not easily understood.
Fishbowl is far better than our previous Access database system. Tracking parts is much easier.
Fishbowl Manufacturing (FBM) Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Support understands my problem Quick Initial Response | Difficult to get immediate help |
No - Fishbowl is not that difficult and the original package comes with support so we should not need more. If a system is that difficult I would not choose to use it.
Fishbowl has provided good support lately - not quite up to the exceptional support yet.