Jobboss2 - NOT one place for everything. Yes to digitized routings and time tracking, No to quoting, margins, consignment, blankets, inventory planning, raw material, forecasting, no customization.
October 30, 2023
Jobboss2 - NOT one place for everything. Yes to digitized routings and time tracking, No to quoting, margins, consignment, blankets, inventory planning, raw material, forecasting, no customization.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with JobBOSS²
Jobboss2 is our company's ERP platform. We use it to track customer orders, inventory, time tracking, outside service processing, and production routings. The problem it solves is the manual tracking of orders, inventory, and routings in Excel spreadsheets & on paper, which was a slow, cumbersome, repetitive, and often redundant task. Inventory was tracked in a spreadsheet previously, orders were tracked in their own individual spreadsheets, and job routings existed on pen & paper. We're now able to track all of our parts and routings in Jobboss, tweak them easily to launch new production runs, and capture inventory information. Instead of manually tracking time with a time clock or pen and paper, machinists are now able to scan a bar code and start recording their hours automatically for particular operations.
- Inventory.
- Job routings
- Time tracking
- quoting - limited functionality currently
- costing of jobs and parts - there is very limited information on how their calculations work and limited customization of costing. Most of the job costing or margin reports are inaccurate. Costing is a black box with Jobboss2 that doesn't allow you to better understand how they are calculating nor the ability to tweak the variables of those calculations to align their reports and models with the way your organization costs and prices jobs.
- Raw material inventory and resource tracking for jobs - we don't even use the raw material function because it's inflexible. When you quote raw material, oftentimes you ask for one size diameter of raw material...but the vendor may not have it and often the next best size instead. When/if this happens, you'd have to delete or re-add the raw material to jobboss2 and re-assign that size to every part that's used. You'd, in theory, have to have every possible size of raw material and every spec of raw material that you use in Jobboss2, and you'd still have to re-assign it all of the time to different parts when you couldn't find the ideal size of material. This is a huge gap.
- Automatically logs you out while using the platform, even with only one tab open. We'll be actively using jobboss2, and even within a minute of login, you click on a module of jobboss2, and it will ask you to log in again. Very frustrating.
- Inability to open multiple tabs in Jobboss2. We need to crossreference information all of the time, comparing inventory, last jobs routings & dates, and costs which we try to pull up multiple tabs in jobboss2, but it does not effectively allow you to do this. It's slightly possible, but oftentimes will log you out of your session as soon as you open a new tab.
- Blanket orders and consignment - Jobboss2 is ineffective at allowing efficient tracking of blanket orders or parts on consignment. There's no functionality for consignment tracking of parts as you try to track replenishment buckets.
- Customizable reports with more field and table selections - reports can be customized but only with the fields that Jobboss2 provides for that specific report. We need to link other tables from the database to be able to see the information that we need, and jobboss2 does not easily allow you to link a new table into reports to add additional fields that you want or need to see. For example, in Salesforce...you can pick specific tables that you want to link together and pull any field that you need. Jobboss2 only allows you to see the specific tables that they pre-built for reports. If you need another field that's missing on the report, you'd have to know SQL in order to add it vs. a user-friendly report builder that anyone non-technical would be able to use, which is standard in most other software platforms for ERP or CRM.
- material/inventory forecasting to plan when you need the next job - this is incredibly limited. We typically look out for 2-12 months to plan when we'll need the next lot for a particular part. Jobboss2 material forecast will only let you look at the next 4 months as 4 columns and then it groups any months beyond that into one 5th column. You should be able to set a specific time horizon (i.e. from today to 12 months out and see the stock level and orders needed for each of those next 12 months. As a result, we still have to use manual spreadsheets to plan our production and scheduling jobs.
- jobboss2 upcharges for most new features or modules that you want to add. For example, they've built reports that would be incredibly useful for the majority of their customers, but they charge to add one simple report because it's considered a customization.
- Jobboss2 has made us more efficient on the production floor by automatically clocking into jobs by scanning a barcode, saving manual data entry of hours, pcs good for each operation, and final inventory from a job.
- Jobboss2 limitations have a negative impact on the business, requiring separate manual spreadsheets for inventory/production planning, raw material, consignment, blanket orders, costing, margins, and other items.
- Jobboss2 has helped us with inventory tracking for discrete orders which saves time of having to check inventory manually. However, it has limitations for inventory planning, resulting in manual spreadsheets.
No. We are able to manage 50% of the shop in one place, mostly with production, but the production planning, resource planning (raw material), consignment, blanket orders, costing, financial analysis of margins for a portfolio of parts for a particular customer, pricing/quotes are all done separately outside of Jobboss2 due to its limitations. It's close to being able to have a lot of these things, but the features the system has for these are not effective for how we'd need to use the system.
Quickbooks. We still use QuickBooks for raw material procurement, processing invoices, and issuing POs. We are exploring Paperless Parts as an integration due to Jobboss2 limitations with quoting and pricing. Jobboss2 should seriously consider adding a Zapier integration, which would allow customers to easily integrate with a multitude of other platforms without having a technical person/software engineer on staff.
We initially selected E2, and then E2 was acquired by ECI, which has Jobboss. Then E2 morphed into Jobboss2.
Do you think JobBOSS² delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with JobBOSS²'s feature set?
No
Did JobBOSS² live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of JobBOSS² go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy JobBOSS² again?
No