Fishbowl Inventory vs. Valogix Inventory Planner

The purchasing function is very good - tracking and linking parts to sales orders, shortage reports, and part summaries.

Incentivized

Valogix is a good tool for a mid to large sized business who has a lot of SKUs and much data that needs to be analyzed to determine supply. It is best used by savvy people, as there is quite a learning curve to it. It integrates well with NetSuite, though I cannot speak to how well it may integrate with other ERP systems.

Incentivized

• Inventory Management.
• Ingredient and Recipe Management.
• Cost Control and Variation.

Incentivized

• Calculates how much it thinks you should have on-hand, based on demand and other factors.
• Integrates with NetSuite to include all your demand, supply, item and location data.
• Automatically determines seasonality for items.

Incentivized

• Reporting: Many of the reports that are provided for free with Fishbowl are useless in the context of everyday manufacturing and production planning. Some reports provide inaccurate information. In order to use get useful and correct reports, outside developers must be paid (a new or modified report may cost anywhere from $150 to $2000)
• Customer service can be hit or miss. In our experience, a knowledgeable person is rarely available, but for the most part customer service has no idea how real manufacturing works to provide reasonable answers to fix Fishbowl shortfalls.

Incentivized

• The UI for their product (web application) is weak.
• Does not support multiple units of measure well.

Incentivized

Originally the support for Fishbowl was very poor. It was hard to get anyone to help. In the last 12 - 14 months, it has greatly improved and if it continues this way I would certainly rate it higher.

Incentivized

Fishbowl could be tailored to accommodate our needs and to integrate with other providers to offer the seamless work flow. Others that I investigated were much more expensive or couldn't do the tasks we were requiring. The final analysis was that Fishbowl offered a cost effective way for us to manage our business

Incentivized

Compared to NetSuite's default demand planning module, Valogix shines. NetSuite's product is very weak, very manually-driven, and does not provide the precise level of control that Valogix does. We used NetSuite's module for a while before realizing it wouldn't work for us whatsoever. It might work for you if you have a simple product setup, few SKUs and only one location. But in that case, you probably don't need demand planning software anyway.

Incentivized

• Intuitive functionality
• unified dashboards
• better integration

Incentivized

• It has begun to reduce time for us taken up by running manual spreadsheet calculations.
• The training was time-consuming and difficult to onboard new users when we had turnover.

Incentivized