Job Tracking

Job Travelers

One feature that needs serious work (and testing) in Fulcrum is the very concept (let alone execution) of job travelers and labels.

Each traveler that gets created has a scan-able QR code and some basic information about the job or Item or shipment, etc. Here are the main issues:

1. The QR code is useless: most of the time when someone wants to scan a code using a device they would open their camera app and click the associated link. Since the Fulcrum QR codes don't contain the domain information this doesn't work. You can only scan the code from a search dialog box in a specific area of Fulcrum. There is also no main 'scan' option (in the menu bar) so you would actually have to get to an area (like Job Tracking) that has a search bar to be able to use this feature.

2. The encoded information in the. QR code is not a displayable data point: the Job ID that Fulcrum encodes into their QR codes for Jobs is not the Job ID or Job Name, it is a unique identifier (likely from their database) but there is no good way to match that ID to any relevant Job information.

3. Custom traveler/label size: so this one just feels like a half-baked feature. Fulcrum allows you to set a "custom" size for labels but it will not actually reformat anything, it is just scaling up or down. This will crop the labels, not fully utilize the space you have and still will not produce a good label on the actual size thermal labels we print.

4. Extra space = black: for some reason, the extra space around the "custom" label size will often print as grayscale toner... waste of ink and just awful.

5. No black-and-white option: for some reason the labels all have color in them (which does not print well on standard Thermal printers) and there is no way to change or disable that.

6. Text cropping: not all the text prints (even if you have set a huge template size). Descriptions or long job names will get cropped or wrapped to multiple lines in the middle of a word.

7. Job notes don't print (they use to, now with custom label sizes they don't)

8. PO#s don't print. Again, they use to, but now they don't. The Fulcrum Sales Order number will print but the customer order number doesn't.

How to fix it?

The best way for Fulcrum to fix this would be for them to test it.

If they tested it and found all these issues they would know that they needed to be fixed. If they have tested all of this and it all work for them... provide us with some DOCUMENTATION so that we can follow the recommended steps and make this work in our shop.