Production Software Question

[John George]

I am currently in the market for production software for my growing company. It needs to track employee times and efficiency at multiple jobs at once. Must manage inventory, use a scanner and needs to work in real time with Quickbooks preferably. Needs to help in scheduling and do production reports. Also needs to be on the web for customer tracking. Anyone have any idea where I should look. Kind of new to the production side of things, so I have no idea what is good and available out there. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance for your feedback,
John

[Fulcrum]

Though I can't recommend software that does everything that you want, I do believe that the type of production you do will make a difference on what you need. I use accountedge accounting software and it does most of what you want to some degree.

Scheduling is a different beast. Your manufacturing philosophy (lean, QRM, traditional, etc.) will dictate what you need to use. Personally I like the white, dry erase board - it's cheap, easy to see at a glance, easy to understand. I'm also quite small and don't have 100+ open jobs at any given time.

[KaterinaM]

I would recommend to try Jira as CRM systems. I may cover some of the functions you need.

[Stephen]

I am currently in the market for production software for my growing company. It needs to track employee times and efficiency at multiple jobs at once. Must manage inventory, use a scanner and needs to work in real time with Quickbooks preferably. Needs to help in scheduling and do production reports. Also needs to be on the web for customer tracking. Anyone have any idea where I should look. Kind of new to the production side of things, so I have no idea what is good and available out there. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance for your feedback,
John

Hi John,

There is a tool out there called OpenERP. It basically does almost everything you need at once from a single dashboard. Quite convenient, it's what I use in my startup. Not sure if it works real time with Quickbooks though, but you can easily check that. There are hundreds of modules available that you can easily install and I wouldn't be surprised if one of them was to integrate with Quickbooks.
Alternatively, you also have Dolibarr ERP/CRM that presents similar features and is very user-friendly as well.
Both software are open-source and you can find them on the web for free.

Just as advice - if you are like me and you are not at all technical (Or you don't want to bother with installation, maintenance, etc.), you may want to try and have the software hosted for you somewhere.
We use a website called Maestrano (https://maestrano.com/apps) on which you can find those software and actually more and they are ready to use. We are still not paying as they have quite a generous trial offer (But we are not that many of us either, so not sure for you).

Hope this will help.

Cheers!
Stephen.

[Mark Shipman]

The best case scenario is that a company makes an ERP system specifically for your industry niche. You aren't going to find anything that is "real time" with Quickbooks though. The only way to get data in from a 3rd party is an export process. It doesn't have to be ugly or hard - but it is a step that needs to happen before reports are accurate on the financial side.