E2 Shop System alternative, where Shoptech E2 shops can go now that ECI sells JobBOSS2 instead

The facts come from ECI's own pages, and they are short.

• ECI's product menu lists "E2 MFG, Shop management software for small to mid-sized businesses (for existing customers)". The original JobBOSS carries the same label
• The old shoptech.com address now forwards to the JobBOSS2 product page, which describes itself as "JobBOSS2, formerly E2 Shop"
• ECI's E2 support page describes E2 MFG as an ERP with accounting, job costing and tracking, quality control, purchasing, estimating, project scheduling and shipping
• JobBOSS2 is sold in three packages, Silver, Gold and Platinum, priced by quote and licensed per user

What ECI does not publish is an end of support date for E2. Nothing forces you off it tomorrow. But a product sold only to its installed base gets fixes, not a roadmap, and every year you stay the migration gets larger because there is more history to move.

The first three are ERP decisions. The fourth is a scheduling decision, and it is the one most E2 shops are really trying to make when they start looking, because the complaint that sends them looking is usually "we never know which job will be late", not "our quoting is broken".

Take a job shop with 12 people: an owner, an estimator, an office manager, a planner and eight machinists, where four people need to work in the system and everyone else needs to see the schedule. None of the ERP vendors publish prices, so the figures below are third party estimates, attributed, and they are a sketch, not a quote.

The row most E2 shops miss is the last one. On JobBOSS2, Silver and Gold make you choose Scheduling or Quality Management; only Platinum includes both. A shop that needs quality records for its customers and a real schedule is pricing Platinum. We break that down on JobBOSS pricing, and the ProShop numbers on ProShop ERP pricing.

E2 is good at what it was built for. Reviewers and even rival vendors credit its quoting and estimating, its quote to order flow and its job costing. Its scheduling board supports finite and infinite loading. So why do E2 shops still run the week off a whiteboard?

• The schedule depends on routings and work center capacities being kept current in E2, and in a busy shop they drift
• The board shows load, but the question the owner asks every morning is which customer order will ship late and by how much
• Only licensed users see it, so the machinists on second shift work from a printout that was out of date by lunch
• Rescheduling after a rush job or a broken spindle takes longer than the shop has

A dedicated finite capacity scheduler answers those four without touching quoting, job costing or the books. You export open jobs and routings from E2, set up machines and shifts once, and get a projected finish date for every job and the week's bottleneck named. See how that works on job shop scheduling software, and the machine view on machine scheduling software.

If you do decide to replace E2 entirely, these are the questions that change the price and the risk.

• How much history comes across: open jobs only, or closed jobs with actual costs for future quotes
• Whether your quote templates and price breaks survive the move, since that is often E2's most valuable data
• Who does the migration, the vendor or a partner, and whether that is a fixed fee or billable hours
• Whether scheduling is in the package you are quoted, or an extra module or tier
• How many people need a seat, and whether the shop floor can see the schedule without one
• What happens to accounting: E2 has its own, while many replacements expect QuickBooks, so plan how receipts and card spend that used to be keyed into E2 purchasing will be handled, for example with software that reads and categorizes receipts
• What you pay if you leave, and how you export your data

If the honest answer to "what is broken" is late orders, you can fix that first for a few hundred dollars a month and make the ERP decision later, with better data and without a deadline.

ECI has not published an end of support date. E2, now listed as E2 MFG, is supported for existing customers but not sold to new ones, and ECI's development goes into JobBOSS2, which it describes as formerly E2 Shop. Plan a move on your own timeline rather than waiting for a notice.

JobBOSS2. ECI launched it in May 2021 by combining E2's cloud design with the original JobBOSS feature set, and it is the upgrade path ECI offers E2 customers. It is sold as Silver, Gold and Platinum packages, priced by quote and licensed per user.

ECI no longer sells E2 to new customers, so there is no current list price. Third party figures in circulation, from PAX, a rival vendor, put cloud E2 at about 45 to 150 USD per user a month and on premise licenses from 4,995 USD with 15 to 25 percent yearly maintenance. For a current number, the question is what JobBOSS2 costs, which ECI quotes.

For a full ERP, E2 shops usually compare JobBOSS2, ProShop, Fulcrum and Global Shop Solutions. If E2 still handles quoting, costing and accounting well and the problem is late orders, the cheaper route is to keep E2 and add a finite capacity scheduler at 149 USD per plant a month with unlimited users.

Yes. Export open jobs and routings from E2 to a spreadsheet, import them into a dedicated scheduler, and set up machines and shifts once. E2 stays the system of record for quotes, costing and books, while the schedule shows which jobs will be late and why.