Fulcrum

Fulcrum is an Excellent ERP Software!!!

Pros

I find the product incredibly user-friendly, and their integration team is simply fantastic! They genuinely value our opinion and are proactive in implementing our ideas.

Cons

Contacting support by phone is not a simple process.

Fulcrum transformed my small cut & sew factory

Pros

As the owner of a 10 person cut and sew garment factory in Detroit, my small and bootstrapped business needed a tech tool to help us scale without breaking the bank. Unfortunately, finding the right solution seemed impossible. That's when we discovered Fulcrum. This amazing tool consolidated over 30 Excel sheets into a user-friendly format. It streamlined our organization and ensured everyone was on the same page. Plus, it saved us an incredible amount of time by eliminating the need for manual data entry and cleaning. Previously, my staff tracked production times on their phones and with pen and paper, only to manually enter it into Excel at the end of each day. Now, thanks to Fulcrum, it's all done in real-time using iPads at their workstations. The Fulcrum team has been absolutely incredible and readily available, even a year after implementation, to assist with any issues that arise. I can't recommend it enough for small manufacturers like us.

Cons

Occasionally, there's a slight delay between entering data and its appearance in the system, which can initially confuse my shop staff when things don't align immediately. However, it almost always corrects itself in due time and matches up correctly. Overall, I'm highly impressed with the minimal issues we encounter, and we simply need to resync data occasionally.

Has the potential to become the key driver of growth in your manufacturing company

Pros

Since December 2020, our manufacturing company in New Zealand has been implementing and utilizing Fulcrum. With a workforce of 25, half of whom are spread across sales, marketing, engineering, and admin, and the other half working on the shop floor as production team members, we've experienced rapid growth, doubling our headcount in the past 12 months. In our quest for tools to facilitate scalability, we firmly believe that Fulcrum will have the most significant impact on our growth when we reflect five years from now. The launch team assigned to us from day one played a crucial role in our successful implementation. We had weekly video calls with them, where they patiently guided us through the basics, answered our numerous questions, and assisted us in preparing the data necessary for Fulcrum to go live. However, it's important to note that the implementation took longer than expected, primarily due to issues with our data set. Our BOMs lacked clarity, and the process of transferring the data to Fulcrum was not as streamlined as we had hoped. More detailed information can be found in the section below. We opted for a staged launch of Fulcrum within our business, gradually transitioning key components from our previous systems over a span of approximately six months. We started with inventory management, followed by jobs, and finally implemented the job tracking component used by our production team members on the shop floor. Additionally, on the day we launched job tracking, we conducted a full stocktake.

Cons

Our relationship with the key staff at Fulcrum is excellent. Given that their company is still young and the product is evolving, they face similar growing pains as we do. As a result, we have frequent communication with them regarding the product and the resolution of any problems or questions we raise. We believe the core of the product is solid, especially the Scheduler, which works like magic. However, there is room for improvement in the user experience, from onboarding to day-to-day usage by our team. It's worth noting that they are actively working on enhancing it. Over the past 10 months of using the product, we've witnessed incremental refinements, and we've been informed that the pace of improvement will only accelerate as their engineering team expands. Regarding the setup process, our company has fewer than 2000 unique item numbers across approximately 10 core products. Unfortunately, our previous inventory system maintained them as flat BOMs, so it took us a significant amount of time to structure the data for Fulcrum's understanding. Additionally, being based in New Zealand posed some challenges, as we required a US-based Fulcrum team member to upload our data each time we had a new version to test. Due to the time zone differences, this generally occurred once per day. However, we believe that if the upload process were accessible through a user-facing page, we could have expedited the process.