Fulcrum Reviews

Fulcrum has allowed us to significantly grow our business through timely and accurate quotes, shop-wide communication and on-time delivery.

Every so often, we discover a "bug" as they are continually improving their software. These are quickly remedied and we rarely skip a beat.

Fulcrum allows us to have a cohesive system across our company, enabling efficient communication and complete visibility to jobs.

FulcrumPro creates an excellent solution for paperless shop floor management. Using tables critical data is collected for the manufacturing process

Some of the back end user interface is cumbersom at times

Paperless solution to quality mangement

This is the first Manufacturing ERP built and designed for the modern era. Fulcrum is constantly changing and growing while maintaining a culture with its customers that most companies strive for. When choosing Fulcrum, you become a part of this close-knit community where you're on a first-name basis with most of their team and other Fulcrum users. Everyone involved Is so enthusiastic about helping one another. The culture alone puts Fulcrum above Jobboss; Fulcrum's pure focus is providing a product that constantly meets your need as you expand and grow. The Platform Is great and open-ended, meaning no matter your size or specialization in the manufacturing world, you can tailor Fulcrum to meet your needs. Great for service providers to turn-key providers fulcrum can adapt and support your business. With weekly update rollouts, Fulcrum finds new ways to bring innovation to your company.

The key difference compared to other ERP Systems is that everything revolves around the Item you are producing and the machines you're running it on. Employees or companies are not tied to a particular item or device, allowing for flexible solutions while reducing redundancy. Everyone is in sync and aware of jobs, articles, revisions and changes going on with an order from your office to your shop floor.

Fulcrum should be your first choice to keep your company competitive while fostering a foundation to grow, especially in automation. Fulcrum's open API opens integration with many powerful tools, allowing basic communication improvements to complete a department's workflow automation.

Honestly? Diskiles about Fulcrum are so short-lived with my company. With weekly updates and improvements, what might be a pain this week could easily be solved following an update. The platform is constantly changing, and Fulcrum is always listening to feedback. If something may not work for you in particular, reach out to your Rep, I guarantee they are either already working on an update for it or have solutions in place to help adapt Fulcrum to your needs.

Listing my current dislikes would be mute because Fulcrum today may be different from he Fulcrum tomorrow.

The complete organization and automation of our day to day business

We looked at various ERP systems as a small to medium-sized medical device manufacturer. Ultimately, we decided on Fulcrum for a variety of reasons:

- User-friendly interface and ease of use

- The scheduling platform was superior to other ERPs.

- Not limited to # of users, based on the size of the company then every employee has access without additional costs (Huge for us to get entire buy-in and use from all employees top to bottom)

- Job tracking and cost analysis

- 3D part viewer under each item

- Continually releasing updates and new features at no additional costs

Fulcrum was an easy and right choice for Qualitex, Inc. It has been a tremendous help in improving our process flow and scheduling to help ensure on-time deliveries. The cost analysis and reporting features are enormous for ensuring we maintain margins and where we can improve. The onboarding process with Fulcrum was in-depth and systematic to ensure we ran smoothly without hiccups. We integrated with QuickBooks, and while we were initially nervous about that, the Fulcrum team ensured everything went well.

I would tell anyone considering an ERP to consider Fulcrum strongly, do the demos, talk with the team and let them show you the power behind it.

There isn't much not to like about Fulcrum. I've expressed my only "dislikes" to their product development team.

- A way to track tooling/fixturing costs under items & jobs (there are roundabout ways to do this, but a straightforward way would be excellent)

- When logging in and out of jobs on the job tracker, it would be nice to be able to set a stop time for when you are running lights out overnight and know when the machine will stop at a specific time (currently, you have to go manually enter the time)

- A little more flexibility in controlling the schedule where you see fit. The scheduler is very powerful and uses some form of algorithm and AI to generate the best manufacturing schedule. However, as we all know from running businesses, there is still a human element. You can turn a setting on to drag and drop the scheduling, but it can be cumbersome.

All the items about there are work-around ways to achieve what you want, but if they were more straightforward, it would save some time and give visibility.

Scheduling and cost tracking for profitability.

My biggest draws towards Fulcrum were the user interface and the scheduler. During my research, Fulcrum appeared to be to only MRP with an auto-scheduling feature. During our launch process, we had to tweak it a little bit, but once it was fined tuned, it began to represent what we needed on a day to day basis. We barely have to do any manual scheduling any more.

The user interface was a crucial element for me, as my workforce is primarily welders, who have little computer experience in the workplace. I needed an easy-to-use, and easy-to-learn user interface that was going to help the process. Fulcrum got it right by making a user interface on the job tracker that is click-and-play.

I also have to say during my trial runs of different software, Fulcrum had the best customer support. If you have worked with any management software before, you will discover that Fulcrum is easy to set up. Even though it's fairly easy, you have a dedicated launch manager with you every step of the way to answer questions, help overcome challenges, and help make you successful. The other MRPs on the market were hard to learn, and they didn't set you up for success.

Fulcrum is also receives updates weekly and is built on modern web-based technology. It can work on any device and is accessible from anywhere in the world. It's great for me, as I oversee my business remotely often.

The biggest feature I am missing in Fulcrum is bulk editing or the ability to export all items, modify them in excel, and reimport them. Most my products are similar, but have slight variations, so when I need to make a change I have to go through one item at a time to make the changes happen. It is important during your launch process to consider how you may need to change your products in the future when building out your bill of materials, routings, and subcomponents.

Fulcrum is saving us time and money by improving our, scheduling, inventory tracking, purchasing, and automation processes. We launched an ecommerce storefront on shopify, and Fulcrum integrates seamlessly. Once an order is placed on the store, it goes straight into Fulcrum. Fulcrum also reports to shopify our current product inventory levels. Once we ship the item in Fulcrum, it notifies shopify that the order is fulfilled.

On the operations side, we have reduced our inventory checking from daily to weekly, saving us important time. We are also saving approximately an hour every purchase order we place, as Fulcrum shows you what materials you need to purchase and making a PO is as simple as clicking a button to add the item to the PO and it will email directly to our vendor. It integrates straight into quickbooks and allows us to link our bill.

We are saving alot of manual data entry now.

Also, Fulcrum is allowing me to manage my manufacturing operations remotely. That is not common in our industry, but all of the data that Fulcrum offers allows me to make decisions even if I'm not present.

The software is excellent for managing our fabrication shop workload. What I like best about Fulcrum is that their team will listen and input our feedback!

I would like to be able to talk to people on the phone, versus email.

Keeping track of all our customers, projects, orders, etc.

Pros:

Looks great

Intuitive for those familiar with computers, laid out in an easy to navigate way for those that aren’t

Fast job processing speed, and fast repeat part reorders and previous job traceability

Paperless nature make in-process print revisions easy to execute

Everything is connected, so if you have a PO#, Quote#, job#, part#, or even raw material #, you can find your way to the information you need in the system.

The inventory system is very transparent, and it has all sorts of options for note taking when it comes to inventory changes.

Customer support is spectacular.

The launch process went very smoothly for us, and having personal support assigned to us is fantastic. Any issues we come across are resolved very quickly.

The dev team is on top of it, with frequent updates, many of them being directly from customer feedback. We've been with the company less than 6 months, and at least 1 of our requests has already been implemented as a feature, along with several other changes we wanted already being in the pipes before we suggested them.

Cons:

The reports section is the weakest section for us. It does not output the data in a way that can be quickly read (Pretty charts and meters), although it does give you most of what you need to generate those charts and reports. The support staff is also excellent about generating custom reports that automatically update when something the system won’t make a report for is needed.

Associating multiple jobs to one PO is more limited than we would like, but that is on the roadmap

Once a job has been started, edits to it are limited. This has already been improved by small updates since we started using it though and I have no doubts it will be fully addressed.

The fully online nature of the system means that an internet outage leaves you in the dark. Nothing to be done about this though.

The scheduling system is decent, but you need to accurately estimate production times for each part/job for it to be useful (as is expected), and the display in the schedule tab is not as easy to read as I would like. (I like Gantt charts) It does lay out upcoming due jobs in the jobs tab via sorting by production date though, and that's still loads better than how we were handling it previously.

Fulcrum supports our job shop environment better than any other software that I looked at. The traceability, notes sections, and how everything ties together makes it tremendously easier for us to generate and execute a new "Hot" job without losing traceability or causing too much confusion on the floor

I run a 10 person cut and sew garment factory in Detroit. We're a small and bootstrapped business that needed a tech tool to scale to the next level, but hadn't found the right solution, and more importantly that fit our very small budget. Fulcrum consolidated all of our 30+ Excel sheets into one easy to use format. It keeps us organized and all on the same page. It also saved a ton of time from entering data and cleaning data. My staff was all tracking production times on their phones and with pen and paper before manually entering it into Excel at the end of each day, now it's all done in real time via iPads that everyone keeps at their work station.

The Fulcrum team is all amazing and very accessible even a year after implementation to help us with all issues that arise. I couldn't recommend it more for small manufacturers.

Sometimes there is a little lag between data entered and when it shows up in the system, which throws my shop staff off when everything isn't lining up right away, but it almost always corrects in time and matches up. Overall I'm very impressed how little issues we have, we just need to resync data on occasion.

Helped organize our business in one easy to use platform, tracking inventory, reducing data tracking and entry for staff members, organizing our purchasing process, warehousing process, and overall forcing us to clean up our processes and drive consistency.

This is one of the most Secure ERPs under Cloud which let their user can track production and chart format report which is simple and gives a data point for your reporting and considering the next step.

Scheduling module UI changes but they were for the better performance and enhanced the user experience hence I am good now as their documentation was capable enough to answer most of my queries.

Our Hardware and storage manufacturing unit use fulcrum pro for tracking all its transaction and throughput

I think the best thing about Fulcrum is its overall simplicity and layout, as well as frequent feature updates and support. At times this simplicity can be limiting, but the team is pretty good about taking in recommendations, and updates are both regular and useful! Having a specific onboarding team member there by your side during implementation and then a success manager to help with questions after the fact is amazing, and easily the best part of Fulcrum when compared to other MRPs which just leave you to figure it out yourself.

At times, the limitations mentioned before can be a bit of a block. I'd say 80% of businesses that run conventionally will never have issues with Fulcrum, but our particular setup is fairly complex and constantly changes thus leading to some issues that we have to address ourselves.

Inventory, purchasing, tracking workfloor/production times, accounting (to some extent), job tracking.