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!

It's not that our sales volume has outgrown JobBoss, but our processes have. The lack of flexibility and customization are forcing us to work outside of JobBoss (e.g. custom software). The more that happens, the more obvious it is that JobBoss isn't right for us. I always consider JobBoss as a first source for our processes. Most of the time it can do something similar to what we want, but we would have to make serious concessions to make it fit.

Ps. Stop sending "Important JobBoss Updates" that are primarily selling custom utilities.

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.