This manufacturing software solution offers smaller and mid-sized companies an opportunity to upgrade from paper systems or QuickBooks/Excel combinations to one that can handle quotes, planning, and managing the manufacturing process. With JobBOSS, you have the option to integrate it with QuickBooks or get with the JobBOSS accounting module. Its pricing also means you can get into it without committing to a huge investment. JobBOSS comes from a company called Exact, founded in 1984 by a couple of guys working out of a garage. Ever since then, they’ve maintained a commitment to developing superior software solutions for SMBs. Although Exact is headquartered in the Netherlands, JobBOSS has its offices in the US. If you’re looking to streamline quotes, orders, job creation and scheduling, materials planning, manufacturing execution and job shop floor control, JobBOSS is worth a second look.

Pros

JobBOSS receives praise from a small group of users for being both easy to learn and easy to use as it’s not very complicated. Given that the paragraph that follows is much longer, it might be assumed that these satisfied users run relatively simple job shops with smaller volumes.

Cons

Users note a variety of different limitations that fail the common sense test, citing different basic functionalities that ought to be included in the software but aren’t. In other words, unless you’re in a very “typical” job shop environment, you’re probably going to run into things you wish it would do, and to get them to happen will end up costing you extra money. After all, is there really anything that qualifies as a “typical” job shop? So then you end up relying on their support staff, and you pay a premium price for their time. Why doesn’t the company offer free telephone support? Some speculate they would be overwhelmed with calls. Others note that because it allows users to delete or change items after the have posted, your chances of preserving any kind of audit trail are next to nil because everything can so easily become corrupted. A number of users also note that much of the functionality is not intuitive, but that you can get the hang of it and how it works. Several users also noted that the remote upgrading process seems to always result in a slew of problems that often require support to fix. More than one user noted that the way the modules interact with each other is far from optimal, and changes in one module are not instantly transferred into other modules, which can slow things down significantly. Others note that the scheduling module doesn’t seem very helpful – it’s far too limited to do a decent job by many companies.

There seem to be several items that strike users as annoying, such as tabbing through screens rather than using the enter key as you would expect in most other programs. Those smaller annoyances do add up over time, and if you then find out it’s not going to do a lot of what you want it to do without spending additional money, you can see why so many are frustrated with it.

Find manufacturing software reviews at WhataSoftware.com