Natural Native Gets 80% Productivity Boost by Planning Production with Katana

Company Profile

Natural Native is a manufacturing company that produces cannabis-infused products. Put your tie-dye t-shirts and your Fleetwood Mac albums back where you found them because you’ve got the wrong idea.

Natural Native produce a varied selection of supplements in the form of creams, oils, and consumables by extracting cannabidiol (CBD) from cannabis plants. 

CBD has been documented to have healing properties but doesn’t create a “psychedelic feeling” when ingesting. CBD can be used to lower blood pressure, as a form of pain relief and is even used to combat cancer cells developing!

The hemp used in their products are 100% organic and grown by Natural Native. Any third party ingredients get tested before going into production.

Challenges

The biggest issue that Natural Native discovered was one that affects most start-up businesses. Their business was taking an impromptu approach to production planning and inventory management. “We did not have a manufacturing resource, inventory system, or a production tracking system,” said Madeline from Natural Native. The lack of a proper production schedule or a means to track their inventory led to delays in their manufacturing operations. Natural Native realized that their laid-back approach to managing the business was damaging so quickly. Hence, they decided to overcome:

1. The low order fulfillment rate from, which resulted from poor production planning;
2. The eyeballing method of inventory management, which was inefficient; and
3. Poor communication between team members, which created bottlenecks in production.

Objectives

Natural Native set out to address their challenges by trying to:

1. Improve production planning to increase fulfillment rate by at least 50% and avoid delays;   
2. Implement a more automated inventory management method; and 
3. Improve communication between staff to avoid bottlenecks during production.

How Katana Helped

Natural Native might have been improving the health and lifestyle of their customers, but their methods of management were creating stress and issues within the business. With Katana they have been able to:

1. Improve production planning and increase their fulfillment rate by a whopping 80%;
2. Get more control of their inventory with Katana’s smart auto-booking system; and
3. Develop a schedule and use Katana’s task list so team members can proceed with their objectives.   

Natural Native said, “Katana gave us a system to track our raw goods manufactured in the products and also track production schedules and workflow”. They also admitted that “[…] we didn’t have a system, it was more just looking at what we had and guessing before Katana.”

Katana provides Natural Native with production planning software to get a better overview of their manufacturing processes. Our visual dashboard allows them to check the status of operations and to see what tasks are left to complete.

Our smart auto-booking system allocates available material for production and automatically calculates completion dates. Meaning Natural Native can now act against delaying production because of low inventory levels.

Natural Native’s scheduling has improved from Katana’s drag-and-drop feature. They can prioritize those important MO’s and still maintain smooth production flows.

After transitioning to Katana, Natural Native said they have noticed improvements to their workflow and realized how much waste they were able to reduce once they were set-up with the new system.