Fishbowl

Pros

Fishbowl is a great asset to our company. It has been wonderful in helping us manage inventory for our warehouse and tracking errors. The customer support is always amazing. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] our representative is one of the most helpful people. He goes above and beyond to make sure we are satisfied with the product.

Cons

Some reports cost extra, but I understand that it takes them time to write it. The turn around is usually fast.

Pros

Our team found both these ease of use and relative ease of integration to be among the most attractive components of Fishbowl. The variety of modules allow close monitoring of essentially every aspect of
physical asset tracking . With Fishbowl we can organize warehouse parts inventory , print labels,and
organize purchase orders which organizes our supply side. Fishbowl's sales side module allows for effective tracking of lead times as well as sales item forecasting so we are never behind on available inventory .

Cons

Fishbowl Manufacturing software at this time time requires the use of a server which we had to supply .
In exchange for all other features , we see this as a nominal and not inconvenient requirement as at the time we were adding new computer assets. This requirement may not suit all smaller companies.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Fishbowl

Pros

Ease of use but especially the customer service. the employees are very knowledgeable of the product and how it should be used.

Cons

I really do not have one . If there is a problem I can always count on customer service to assist.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Fishbowl

Pros

The customer support is great. It's just hard to get a hold of them when you need to speak to a live person on the phone. The people who work there are the nicest and most helpful when you do get to talk to them and they do resolve the day to day issues that pop up. ie, inventory getting stuck in committed status is a pretty quick fix, but then again, should it really happen in the first place?. Bigger problems take more time to fix, but they seem to keep working on it until its resolved. The people they have providing training are excellent.
The wikis are pretty easy to access and are pretty good

Cons

This year the updates seem to break something that's had been working. Then it takes hours with customer support to fix and get going again.
The phone support team could use more staff because it does take hours to get a call back. The reports are difficult to customize, you have to know programming. There is no simple report writer function or a reports that can be customized.
If you have to pick inventory from two locations for one sales order, it will create two invoices. There is no way around that in Fishbowl. The calendar is pretty basic, could use enhancements. The inventory export CSV file does not use FIFO, but average costing. So if you use FIFO or any other method other than average costing, you have to use a different report instead of getting the data in CSV format.
The shipping module is frustrating and the way it is set up does not allow us to use carton count efficiently, so we have to change the packing list after it's printed. If you want Fishbowl to count the cartons for you, you have to add each carton manually. And if you do that, it will not total or summarize the number of cartons you have, it will list each one individually. So you could have a packing list that could be several pages long.
The UPS integration used to be great and then UPS updated, Fishbowl did not support the updated software and we had to change to UPS Worldship. Definitely a step backwards because the old integration worked beautifully. Now it's more manual and cumbersome.

Pros

Fishbowl was our first system used in our small, internal manufacturing facility. It was critical to have the inventory management, production order and warehouse management functions that Fishbowl provided. It did these things well.

Cons

I think what I would have liked more about this software was was more supply chain features at the time. Maybe we just didn't use them though.