JobBOSS Overview
What is JobBOSS?
JobBOSS is an ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform built for small and medium-sized manufacturers in North America including contract manufacturers, job shops, make-to-order and mixed-mode manufacturers. The solution helps office and production staff to manage day-to-day job information and tasks for improved customer service and on-time deliveries. Organizations can automate and streamline quoting, order processing, inventory, advanced scheduling, quality management (ISO and ASI) payroll, accounting, and data collection processes.
Users can create estimates and prepare quotes by selecting the appropriate costs, allowing the system to automatically make the necessary calculations. JobBOSS helps keep all rates up-to-date for fixed and variable costs, markups, outsourcing, and materials in one location. Job processing features enable production staff to create job orders based on customer orders and stock requirements. Users can view and order materials on the dedicated work order screen, and monitor the delivery of final products.
The solution’s ShopBOSS schedule graph provides insights into available shop floor capacity and allows for flexible scheduling for material availability, actual job performance, and current work center load. The automated whiteboard lets users schedule or reschedule jobs using drag & drop to move operations to different days or work centers.
The production dashboard in JobBOSS provides organizations with an accurate overview of the business, allowing users to track machine capacity, orders in progress, and to-do lists, as well as outstanding work orders and purchase orders. Users can also generate shipping documents such as pack lists, shipping labels, and bill of lading, with reporting to help keep track of on-time delivery rates.
JobBOSS Overview
Pricing
Pricing options
1-year contract: $95 per month per seat.
3-year contract: $70 per month per seat.
Add-on modules are available at additional cost.
JobBOSS subscription price does not include private hosting charges.
JobBOSS Features
Media


JobBOSS Reviews
JobBOSS Reviews
JobBOSS as an ERP
Overall we like the product and have good results with the support teams.
Exact JobBOSS review
Good Service generally and helpful on custom apps. We have done a bunch of them!
Archaic & Tedious
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.
JobBoss - Simple enough but still lots of horsepower for a smaller job shop
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!
Solid Product with good flexability
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.
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JobBOSS as an ERP
Pros
JobBOSS as a standalone is good, with some nice Crystal Reports added on. What makes it great is that there are quite a few add-ons available (for Quality, CRM, etc.) , plus it it stores all of its data in a SQL format that works well with Microsoft products.
Cons
I work mostly in the Finance/Accounting side of the business. There are some basic things that could be added in the next version upgrades.
Response from ECi Software Solutions
Hi John, Thank you for your recent review of JobBOSS! We appreciate your feedback in making our solutions better. Would you mind sharing the basic things you referred to that could be added to our next version upgrades? We would love the opportunity to pass this along to our software dev team. Thanks again and we appreciate you as a customer!
- The ECi Marketing Team
Exact JobBOSS review
Good Service generally and helpful on custom apps. We have done a bunch of them!
Pros
Good first level entry product. Lots of options for expansion. Priced well. works well for most of what we do
Cons
Could be easier to use. Search in fields could search the whole field instead of just in order. Need ability to reschedule batches of jobs or ops. Looking in the future to need better paperless abilities for the floor. This would be drawings, capacity dashboards. Also as things become more connected we are going to need ability to integrate to nesting
Archaic & Tedious
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.
Pros
It has quoting, materials, costing, and scheduling, and job status capabilities.
Cons
Sadly the UI is severely lacking. And it seems not much thought is given to usability and efficiency.
JobBoss - Simple enough but still lots of horsepower for a smaller job shop
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!
Pros
Simple navigation, use of Favourites shortcuts, level of complexity is perfect for smaller organizations.
Cons
Would like to be able to access more information directly from the Job (ie from an outside process, be able to access the Purchase Order that is linked to it).
Solid Product with good flexability
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.
Pros
As someone who does look behind the scenes and works to dig data out of the system, I am impressed with the amount of information that JobBOSS does capture. Additionally, it is quite well organized in its structure. On the front end, the user interface is intuitive and lends itself to easy training.
Cons
Reporting. The stock reports are reasonable for a company that does not need to dig into its data very deeply. But the analysis at deeper levels would either require purchasing many custom reports or have someone on staff that can dig into the data and create custom reports.
The scheduling module works best in an environment with minimal chance of perturbation. Systems that have a high degree of variation become hard to model accurately.
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JobBOSS Pricing
JobBOSS Pricing
1-year contract: $95 per month per seat.
3-year contract: $70 per month per seat.
Add-on modules are available at additional cost.
JobBOSS subscription price does not include private hosting charges.
1-year contract: $95 per month per seat.
3-year contract: $70 per month per seat.
Add-on modules are available at additional cost.
JobBOSS subscription price does not include private hosting charges.
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JobBOSS Features
JobBOSS Features
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Categories
Additional information for JobBOSS
Additional information for JobBOSS
Key features of JobBOSS
- Accounts Payable
- Actual Costing by Job
- CRM
- Change Orders
- Financial Integration
- Manufacturing Execution
- Overrun Reporting
- Production Cost Tracking
- Production Scheduling
- Purchasing
- Quality Management
- Quotes / Estimates
- Sales Management
- Standard Costs
- Supply Chain Management
- Time Tracking
- WIP Schedule
Benefits
JobBOSS FAQs
JobBOSS FAQs
Below are some frequently asked questions for JobBOSS.
Q. What type of pricing plans does JobBOSS offer?
JobBOSS offers the following pricing plans:
Pricing model: Subscription
Free Trial: Available
1-year contract: $95 per month per seat. 3-year contract: $70 per month per seat. Add-on modules are available at additional cost. JobBOSS subscription price does not include private hosting charges.
Q. What are the main features of JobBOSS?
JobBOSS offers the following features:
- Accounts Payable
- Actual Costing by Job
- CRM
- Change Orders
- Financial Integration
- Manufacturing Execution
- Overrun Reporting
- Production Cost Tracking
- Production Scheduling
- Purchasing
- Quality Management
- Quotes / Estimates
- Sales Management
- Standard Costs
- Supply Chain Management
- Time Tracking
- WIP Schedule
Q. Who are the typical users of JobBOSS?
JobBOSS has the following typical customers:
Small Business, Mid Size Business
Q. What languages does JobBOSS support?
JobBOSS supports the following languages:
English
Q. Does JobBOSS support mobile devices?
We do not have any information about what devices JobBOSS supports
Q. What other apps does JobBOSS integrate with?
JobBOSS integrates with the following applications:
Fulcrum, QuickBooks Online Advanced
Q. What level of support does JobBOSS offer?
JobBOSS offers the following support options:
Phone Support, Online Support
Overall we like the product and have good results with the support teams.