Fulcrum

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.

What I like most about Fulcrum is the on-demand technical support. No matter how small or big the issue, I am always one email or IM away from receiving fast, direct support.

My only complaint about the software is the (occasionally) slow load times and the several workarounds needed due to software/invoicing limitations.

We have been implementing and using Fulcrum at our manufacturing firm in New Zealand since December 2020. Our company has a headcount of 25, half spread across sales, marketing, engineering and admin, and the remainder as production team members working on the shop floor. We’ve doubled our headcount in the last 12 months, and are looking for tools to help us scale more rapidly. We believe that looking back in 5 years from now, Fulcrum may well be the tool that had the biggest effect on our growth.

The launch team that we were paired with from day one of our implementation were instrumental in our successful launch. We had weekly video calls with them to help us understand the basics, they answered our myriad of questions and they helped us with preparing the data we needed to get Fulcrum live, but it’s also fair to say the implementation did take us a lot longer than first anticipated. A lot of these delays came down to the data set that we had. Our BOM’s were lacking clarity, and the process of getting the data into Fulcrum was not very streamlined. More details about this are in the section below.

We rolled out a staged launch of Fulcrum in our business, with key components being switched over from the outgoing systems over the course of around 6 months. First Inventory management, then Jobs, and then lastly the Job Tracking component that is utilised on the shop floor by our production team members. We also had to complete a full stocktake on the day Job Tracking went li

We have a good relationship with the key staff at Fulcrum. From their implementation team, right through to their [SENSITIVE CONTENT]. This is because their company is young, the product is still maturing, and they are experiencing the same growing pains that we are - and so with that, we have a lot of communication with them regarding the product, and the resolution of the problems or questions that we raise.

We believe the core of the product is sound. The Scheduler is the magic sauce, and it works. But the user experience within the product from onboarding right through to day-to-day usage of the system by our team has room for improvement. It is also accurate to say that they *are* improving it. The product has been refined incrementally over the 10 months we have been using it and we hear that the pace of improvement will only increase into the future as they scale up their engineering team.

Regarding the setup process. We have less than 2000 unique item numbers in our company, spread across 10 or so core products. Unfortunately, our previous inventory system kept these as flat BOM’s, so adding the data to tree those products for Fulcrum to understand took us a lot of time. Being based in New Zealand also didn’t help, as we needed a US-based Fulcrum team member to upload our data set each time we had another version to test. Due to the timezone differences, this was usually just a once per day operation whereas if the upload was possible via a user-facing page, we believe we could ha

The Scheduler and JobTracker modules are excellent products. They integrate easily with our ERP system and are a key component of keeping our customers happy!

The software is robust and complete. There aren't any features missing. We love the flexibility of customizing things when our business needs change.