From discovery to go-live: how personalized inventory software works

Wouldn’t it be incredible if you could personalize your inventory management software to fit your business logic just right? Well, we have good news: you can.

In this post, we’ll show you how our team personalizes Katana for the businesses we work with. Integrations are just one part of the process. We take the time to understand how a business buys, makes, sells and ships, then adapt Katana to the way it already runs.

Personalizing Katana takes five steps between the first call and go-live.

To make each step concrete, we’ll follow one example throughout: a premium food brand that buys its raw product by weight and sells online, in its own retail store and to wholesale buyers. A contract processor turns the raw product into about 20 finished products and stores them, and a 3PL ships orders from several warehouses.

1. Discovery: where the manual work is

We start by mapping how the business runs, with a close eye on the places where someone steps in by hand, like moving numbers from one tool to another or retyping a partner’s report. With an automated process inside a properly set up inventory system, most of those tasks get done, without anyone stepping in.

In our example, discovery brings up five problems:

• Costing each product. The raw product is bought by weight at prices that change every week, then turned into about 20 products. Working out what each one costs takes about a day a week by hand.
• Tracing batches. There’s no way to follow a batch from the processor to the customer orders it ended up in.
• The holiday rush. About half of the year’s revenue comes in during a 45-day holiday window, and large corporate pre-orders can make products look sold out to retail shoppers.
• Stock at the 3PL. Seeing what’s in each 3PL warehouse means logging into a separate system.
• The processor’s weekly report. Every week, someone types the processor’s production report in by hand.

2. Solution design: your own data, running in Katana

Next, one of our solutions engineers loads one of the brand’s production runs into Katana, with its real products and numbers, and walks the team through it live, from the raw product that goes in to the finished products that come out. After the walkthrough, the brand gets a systems diagram showing how Shopify, the 3PL, the processor and the accounting software would connect to Katana. Between the two, the team can judge the fit and correct anything we misunderstood before scoping starts.

3. Scoping: deciding how each need gets met

We sort every need into one of three groups: what Katana does out of the box, what we configure during setup, and what our team builds for the business. Scoping is also when we drop ideas that a simpler option already covers, which keeps the project focused on what the business needs first.

In our example, discovery turns up 12 needs, and 6 of them are covered out of the box. Two ideas get dropped on purpose: ranking orders by delivery date, which a simpler setup replaces, and planning stock transfers between warehouses, which the 3PL already handles.

Cost that follows the product. Each week’s production at the processor is recorded in Katana, and once the processor’s weights come in, stock is updated so the real yield replaces the estimate. Cost is averaged per product and location and carries through from the raw product into every finished product, while by-products are tracked as products of their own. The team can check what each product costs at any time and see how yield changes over time, without spending a day a week reconciling numbers.

Batch tracking from processor to customer. Batch numbers are recorded when stock arrives and carried through production and shipping, and the 3PL reports which batch went into each order once it ships. Starting from a customer order, the team can find the batch it came from, and starting from a batch, they can find every order it reached, so they can act fast on a quality issue.

A separate location for big pre-orders. We set up a “Corporate” location in both Shopify and Katana, and a Shopify automation sends large or far-out orders there based on rules the business defines. Those orders draw on their own stock, so the brand can take corporate pre-orders weeks or months ahead while retail shoppers keep seeing what’s available during the busiest 45 days of the year. It replaces the idea of ranking orders by delivery date.

Stock at every 3PL warehouse. Through Katana’s native 3PL integration, the 3PL sends stock levels for each of its warehouses into Katana, and Katana updates what’s available in Shopify. Orders still go from Shopify to the 3PL, and the team can see what’s at the processor, in the store and in every 3PL warehouse from one place.

Reading the processor’s weekly report. Someone uploads the processor’s weekly production report, and a tool our team built reads which raw product was used and which products came out, then updates stock in Katana. It works with typed PDFs, and handwritten sheets still get entered by hand.

None of these setups are specific to food:

4. Proposal and scope of work: agreeing what gets built

Once scoping is done, we put together a proposal for the brand that pairs each problem with its fix. The scope of work then sets out what’s in and out of scope and how each piece gets signed off, and both sides sign it before any build starts.

Each sign-off is a test the brand can run on its own operation. Batch tracking, for instance, is signed off when the team traces one batch from the moment it arrives through to a shipped customer order, and back again.

5. Build and go-live: one team from setup to support

With the scope of work signed, a dedicated implementation lead and customer success manager (CSM) take the brand through the build: connecting the 3PL, building the processor report import, training the team and testing each piece against its sign-off. Go-live is timed one to two weeks before the holiday window, so the team is comfortable with the new setup before its busiest stretch, and the implementation lead and CSM stay on afterward as its point of contact for support and future changes.

What a made-to-fit setup can be worth

For a business like the one in our example, the proposal’s estimates could look like this:

None of it requires the business to change how it works with its partners. Katana is shaped around those relationships, and when the business adds a new channel or partner, we use the same process to fit Katana around what’s new.

Let’s talk about your setup

If your business runs across several tools and partners, we’d love to show you what a personalized Katana setup could look like. Book a demo

Andreia Mendes

Andreia proves that even the most technical topics can (and should) be interesting. At Katana, she works with exclusive data from thousands of product SMBs and turns those insights into practical content for growing brands — covering everything multi-channel merchants need to know about inventory management.