You’ve probably heard some variation of the ironic statement, “It took me years to become an overnight success.” This teaches a valuable lesson about achieving success; it usually doesn’t happen by accident. You must do everything you can to prepare yourself to overcome challenges. It’s a long proce

All the world’s a stage of production, and all the parts and products merely players… or something like that. William Shakespeare didn’t have modern manufacturing processes in mind when he penned that famous line in his play As You Like It, but his words still resonate in the manufacturing ind

For years, conventional wisdom has held that outsourcing work to countries with inexpensive labor can save businesses money. Lately, however, talk has turned to “reshoring”—buying the components you need in your manufacturing business from suppliers based in the United States. The f

“They don’t make ‘em like they used to” is an ambiguous phrase to me. It can mean two things: either the end products aren’t the same as they used to be, or the way those products are made isn’t the same. This is usually a lament about how things are so much more complex or lower quality nowadays, b

One of the biggest challenges facing the manufacturing industry right now is a shortage of skilled workers. Seriously. Manufacturing companies want to hire more people, but there aren’t enough qualified workers to fill the positions. The problem is too few young people are majoring in Engineering an

Kirk Tanner, Fishbowl’s Chief Marketing Officer, returns to the Fishbowl Blog this week with another episode of Kirk’s Tackle Shop. In this video, he talks all about work orders – their usefulness for manufacturers and their ability to perform both simple and complex tasks. Fishbowl Inventory’s Manu

Stockouts are a nuisance to both businesses and customers, creating situations where no one is happy. You now have an order sitting in limbo that cannot be filled, while your customer resents the time lost waiting for your new inventory to arrive. You’ve worked hard over the years to secure and buil

Fishbowl’s Manufacturing Option is a powerful inventory management solution for manufacturers. It allows you to do many things, three of which I’ll cover in this blog post: Create single- and multi-level work orders Track thousands of items and their accompanying costs Plan ahead for supply and dem

Which aspect of doing business has the most impact on whether or not a company is successful? Is it the hiring process, the management style or the online marketing strategy? Not necessarily. For many companies, it is how they manage their inventory and control their costs that makes the biggest dif

Fishbowl’s Manufacturing Option is a powerful inventory software solution for manufacturers. In fact, it performs nearly all of the functions of a Material Requirements Planning (MRP) system: Monitoring quantities of raw materials and end products in stock Optimizing inventory levels and keeping th

The United States is blessed with abundant natural resources. But the greatest resource it has is its people’s ability to innovate. American ingenuity has led to many of the world’s greatest inventions, from airplanes to computers and much more. That’s what I learned from an article entitled “Beatin

It seems like just yesterday that I talked about Utah being named the best place to do business by Forbes. Here we are again to celebrate Utah receiving this honor for the third year in a row! Since Fishbowl is headquartered in this state and doesn’t have any plans for moving, this reflects wel

As time goes on, the iPad looks less and less likely to become the iFad. What at first some questioned as a possibly unnecessary tool somewhere between a phone and a laptop has gone mainstream and is now being used for everything from Black Friday shopping to warehouse management and manufactur

Quick quiz on inventory management: Do you know the difference between a Sales Order and a Work Order? What’s a Bill of Materials, and how does it fit in with these other documents? If you’re not sure of the answers to these questions and you want to learn them, you’re in the right place. We’ll defi

If you’ve read even just a few of the posts on the Fishbowl Blog, you know that Fishbowl Inventory offers a comprehensive set of inventory management tools for small and mid-size businesses. Fishbowl Inventory is not only a great tool for retailers, wholesalers and other sellers, but for manufacture

QuickBooks manufacturing software is an important tool for manufacturers. You need to have a firm grasp of your finances and your inventory to effectively run your business. You can better plan your operations and find ways to improve profitability when you have the right tools. Here are seven help

Many economists thought the manufacturing industry was going to shrink in September for the first time in two years. But manufacturers surprised them by beating expectations and actually increasing production, according to the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index. The manufacturing

What’s in store for manufacturing in 2012? Quite a bit! It looks like we can expect even more manufacturing jobs to return the United States as Chinese wages keep rising and the cost of shipping materials to and from China gets more expensive. In the article “Get Ready for Manufacturing’s Big Comeba

Lasers are becoming popular across multiple industries. This is due to the degree of accuracy that lasers are capable of achieving. Here are some of the ways that lasers are being utilized with CNC machines in the manufacturing industry. Quality Control Checkpoints Many of the quality control checkp

The Bill of Materials module is the place where manufacturers spend a lot of their time in Fishbowl Manufacturing. And these hotkeys will help manufacturers make even better use of their time in this module. CTRL + M = Manufacture the selected bill of materials CTRL + Shift + A = Add an item to the