JobBOSS

Overall we like the product and have good results with the support teams.

Good Service generally and helpful on custom apps. We have done a bunch of them!

Archaic and Tedious is exactly how I would describe Exact JobBoss. There are significant limitations in the software to consider up front. Part numbers are limited to 30 Characters. Drawing numbers are limited to 16 characters. General Description field is limited to 30 characters. Their answer to this is to provide an extended description dialog box. But you can not see the value of extended description in any sort of list view, therefore you can not see the complete description of your materials or parts anyplace until you generate quote document, or purchase order document, or a report. The general Description field will clip your description. It will let you enter more than 30 characters. But if you save and exit, then open the same quote it will have clipped the description to 30 characters. The UI is not user-friendly despite other reviews. I seriously doubt they have conducted usability and ergonomics studies with actual customers. It is very easy to get off track and be very disorganized with materials. Where it should have a good predefined material structure. The reporting side is very limited unless you are familiar with programming Crystal reports yourself. If you are building a product structure where multiple components use the same material, there is no way to add the same material to multiple components at once. You can copy material from one component to another, however, you cannot copy just a single material. For example, the component that I am copying from may have 5 materials in it. I have to copy all 5 materials into the target component then delete the materials I don't want in it. Same way with copying routings. A tech support rep argued this with me via email. To convince him I was correct and it was not possible I had to take a video of my screen attempting to copy one material and send that to him. Only then did he come off his position that it was possible. I can not see both the routings of a component and the materials of a component at the same time. They are two separate view windows you have to click back and forth in. Likewise, you cannot see the materials in multiple components at once. You have to click back and forth between the components you are interested in. If they rearranged their UI you could do some of these things, because there is plenty of room on your average size monitor screen. I have a 24" monitor and at a comfortable resolution, JobBoss is really only utilizing about 50% of my display space with actual pertinent information and controls. It's very easy to accidentally delete things and there are not many places where you can Undo, so if you accidentally delete something you are SOL. There is no way to add additional custom properties to a component. For example, I can not have Customer Part # and Our Part#. There are unforeseen nuances as well with formatting as well. If you enter a value in Vendor Reference field or Detail Number, then it overwrites the space for Extended Description on our Purchase Orders with Vendor Reference or Detail Number instead. You can not delete a material that has been used in a job. Unfortunately, we have a terrible material database with poorly named materials. We would like to replace the badly named materials with new materials that make more sense. But there is no good way to do this. Once a material has been used, closed, or scheduled it can not be deleted. It can only be inactivated. But what I want to do is replace it completely. Now they will say that they have a replace functionality, but it is really a rename functionality. But you can only rename one material at a time. So it's not really a replace function. Lastly, if you have limited seats you can set a user sign out after a period of time. However, I have found that if you walk away and have not saved your quote or job and it auto signs you out, it DOES NOT always save it for you. So you may lose work that you have done since last save.

I came on board with my employer in October 2014. They had been using JobBoss for over 10 years. With my ERP background, I quickly discovered that my employer wasn't taking advantage of many of the available utilities, including the Scheduling module. Within 3 months I had all 30 of our machining centers, plus all of the secondary resources and operations, set up and testing completed. Routings were stripped back and rebuilt with proper resource requirement setups to ensure proper scheduling of work and proper timing and load representation. Shift and holiday calendars were constructed properly.

We turned on Scheduling in February 2015. With the first pass of the global scheduler (running infinite loading and allowing schedules in the past) we came out with a past-due backlog of some 4000 hours. After updating job progress on about 150 jobs, realigning a few things and making some setup tweaks, we realized that we were still over 2000 hours past due. However, we now had the theoretical start and end dates to work with, we could time materials properly, and could graph our loads to see what we were doing to ourselves with our booking practices.

Since then, we have improved our utility of the system across the board. Raw material and finished goods inventories are accurate, so we can now use the Material Planning functionality. Raw material issues due to planning are non-existent. PO's for outside processing are now accurately priced, timed, and generated straight from the job routing. Use of Picks, Transfers, and Extra Quantities have given our inventory transactions full transparency.

I look forward to Unite 2017 when I can see hands-on what other companies are doing to tap this system's potential!

Our company has now used JobBOSS for around 4 years. We have found that the user interface is quite intuitive and straightforward to use. This is a plus when training new people on the system. Functionally, it has met most of the needs that we purchased it for.

We loved the idea behind the scheduling module, but have found it to not be a good fit with our shop. We are primarily a custom high mix, low volume shop. This leads to many jobs that have potential to run in more than one pathway on the floor and most jobs are first run where we do not have a history of expected production run times to fall back on. We also have split our shop floor into three self directed production cells that have a fair amount of cross work. The self direction means many production decisions are made at the cell level and not at a command level. Because of these factors, we found that matching our shop floor to the scheduling module was exceptionally difficult unless we were willing to dedicate a full time person to keeping it accurate. In the end, we believe that the scheduling module would work better in a higher volume production environment with more of a top down command structure than how we operate.

The reports that come with JobBOSS are reasonable, however, we have found that digging deeper into the data (at least the directions we looked) required special reporting. It is handy to have someone on staff who is comfortable working with SQL tables, data mining and creating custom reports. Exact does offer custom report creating. Just remember, it come at additional cost.