JobBOSS vs. M1

Time management and inventory control are great. Awesome investment for small business owners for everything from services like plating, or anodizing, to keeping track of our suppliers. Wish it integrated a decent label program with it also.

Incentivized

Implementation is by far the weakest link in the ECI/M1 process. Although the tool is powerful, the client is expected to drive the process of learning the tool, planning the meetings with consultants, identifying risks and making mitigation plans, etc. without any samples, guidance or assistance on the part of ECI. The tool is best suited to high volume, standard product manufacturers who build to inventory or to order without much variation. The shop floor routing and time tracking are straightforward if you can master the convoluted Unit Of Measure calculations. The tool is either hosted locally or accessed through Remote Desktop. Shop floor is web enabled but the main desktop for M1 is still a relay which makes connectivity a potential issue. Moving this platform to a truly web hosted environment would substantially improve connectivity and eliminate compatibility issues with Apple products

Incentivized

• Timekeeping. Clocking in and out.
• Inventory control.
• Travelers or job sheets that keep track of operations.

Incentivized

• Manage inventory counts. Good precision on quantities in and out, through shipping, MI, MR, and receipts.
• Job costing shows great details on labor, operations, and materials to be used. I wished that would do better in outside operations that would return, but we still think it is great.
• Ability to track changes (changelog), showing all changes that had in a particular place. Such as where, when, and by whom a line item unit price was changed in a PO.
• Link, traceability, keeping history. If done correctly, it is amazing to keep the history of a part/lot.
• The amount of user rights/customization is unbelievable. It can be hard to set up in the beginning, but it is great that you can give some very specific access to a user, and it is not (in general) as a package.

Incentivized

• The reporting is through Crystal Reports which is cumbersome to work with and requires someone who knows what they are doing. If you're moving from something like Quickbooks with built in report editing, you're going to be frustrated with creating custom reports.
• If you run mutliple jobs on a single machine or use multi-pallet machines scheduling can get frustrating, and you will have to come up with your own solutions to schedule those machines. (This is not unique to JobBOSS scheduling. We tested several ERP systems in this range and most were lacking in this area).
• Even with the 12.0 update, the interface is still rather dated for the onsite version. The online version looks much better.

Incentivized

• Some of the functions are pretty detailed - and so they take a while to generate screens and pages in reports.
• We actually use it for 2 companies we own - and it would be nice if the inter company communication was a little smoother. It's hard to share some data, and not everything is possible to be shared.
• Customized reports need to backed up before any updates to M1 or they're lost. It seems M1 overwrites the report folders everytime you run an update - so you have to keep track of what you've changed in Crystal Reports and restore it.

Incentivized

Why fix what aint broken

Incentivized

Love the templates we were able to make and add to the program to work specifically for what we need to put on our certifications. We went from typing out each certification on a printed form to being able to work from templates and it was a serious time saver.

Incentivized

Because it would be helpful if ECI would provide better documentation, communication and workflows to understand how each field interacts within the system and how each of those touch other areas within M1. It would also be useful if ECI would provide prescheduled training for how to customize things with M1 through Design Studio

Incentivized

Support has been great and timely

Incentivized

JobBOSS is the centralized solution that has helped us consolidate nearly every process within our company. It's ability to create routings and calculate material by building a job saves us hours every day compared to Quickbooks. Its inventory management is faster and tracks more information than Wasp and its ability to understand raw stock and material shapes makes life so much simpler in a manufacturing environment.

Incentivized

Our customization requirements were not that high and based on a price/cost benefit M1 was the winner. SAP was considered but the upfront costs and challenging learning curve together with the lack of flexibility in the SAP HANA public cloud version made the M1 choice more natural. SAP Services is usually more expensive compared to M1.

Incentivized

• We were using several pieces or software that have all been replaced by just JobBOSS. Inventory, routings, inspections, floor tracking, accounting are now all in a single place.
• It helped us to reorganize our document server and consolidate files. Its ability to link files has created an environment where nearly every piece of information on an order can be found in a centralized single location.
• The quoting module has improved our decision making and ability to see where we were right or wrong on costing.

Incentivized

• Time savings having to only enter certain information once and have it follow through the entire order process from quote to cash

Incentivized