Fishbowl Inventory vs. Thrive Technologies

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

Incentivized

No solution is perfect, but I would say that Thrive is a particularly robust and complex solution that's intended to tackle major demand management and inventory forecasting problems. Smaller companies simply won't need a solution that's so all-encompassing. I would recommend waiting unitl you know that you need it before moving forward with a solution like Thrive.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Cloud-based, accurate forecasting system saves lots of time and can tangibly boosts ROI
• Robust demand management down to the SKU level
• Optimized replenishment prevents too much money from being tied up in inventory

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

• Although it's simpler than many alternatives, it's a highly complex system and at times we felt lost during the transition period.
• We didn't get the results we had imagined when looking at their case studies and marketing materials. I understand many factors go into those things, and their case studies are not necessarily indicative of typical results, but your mileage may vary.
• Inventory replenishment alerts about potential stockouts weren't always reliable.

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

Abas ERP was what we had used previously, and though it did its job adequately, it lacked the forecasting, demand management, and inventory replenishment sophistication of Thrive. We reached a point where we felt it was untenable to supplement the previous system on our own which necessitated the switch to Thrive.

Incentivized

• Intuitive functionality
• unified dashboards
• better integration

Incentivized

• We were able to reduce the amount of resources tied up in inventory
• Forecasting tools meant significantly less time spent trying to wrangle spreadsheets
• The transition was painful, causing initial doubts, but it was certainly worth the growing pains

Incentivized