I don’t have to do anything myself anymore – as soon as the operator marks the manufacturing order as complete, the dashboard on the floor says whether these orders are ready to ship. This all means that I need to spend less time on that sort of stuff and have more time to actually develop my business.
Thomas Judge, Owner at GJ Motorsports
Automotive and metal manufacturing
Powerful features, simple to use
LIVE INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
The inventory optimization and control you need
End-to-end inventory insights that put an end to stockouts and overstock
- Get total inventory control for finished products and raw materials
- Know where your products are, when they are arriving, and how much for each location
- Automate inventory transactions and set reorder points to prevent stock-outs
- Track on-hand, committed, and expected stock amounts in real-time
- Manage product variants and materials in one place
- Monitor your inventory across multiple warehouses
- Use barcodes to receive and count stock
- Use stocktakes to find and eliminate discrepancies in your stock levels
- Receive restock notifications to keep your stock levels optimal
END-TO-END TRACEABILITY
Tracing for batches, expiry dates, serial numbers and more
Keep an eye on your inventory beyond the warehouse
- End-to-end traceability for materials and products with batch tracking
- Track the expiry date of items and stay in control of expiring stock
- Autogenerate batch and internal barcodes
- Use serial numbers to identify individual products for warranty claims, maintenance, and customer support
- Quickly locate items across multiple warehouses, giving all teams access to the same live data
- Trace faulty batches, materials, and products from materials to sold goods for effective quality assurance and recalls
OMNICHANNEL ORDER MANAGEMENT
Unified B2B and e-commerce sales order management
Bring all your sales data to one centralized view
- Sync sales orders from multiple channels into a single dashboard
- Integrate inventory and sales data with e-commerce platforms for efficient order management
- Track the availability of required products for sales order fulfilment
- Track batches and serial numbers for sold items
- Identify delivery delay risks and reprioritize to boost efficiency
- Partially fulfill sales orders, ensuring that customers receive some products when complete order fulfillment is not available
- Choose to make to order or fulfill from available product stock
- Select and use multiple currencies to automatically convert sales order values
- Add shipment tracking information
- Track your sales performance, revenue, profit, and costs
PURCHASE ORDER MANAGEMENT
Built-in purchase order tracking for maximum visibility
Avoid stock-outs and keep your teams and products moving
- Ensure on-time purchasing based on clear material requirements
- Know when to purchase missing raw materials from suppliers
- Update your inventory to reflect when purchase orders were received in parts
- Track delay risks in your supply chain to keep all teams informed
- Select and use multiple currencies to automatically convert purchase order values
- Use automatic unit conversion for purchasing your products to accommodate various packaging and sizing options from suppliers
- Issue purchase orders for fully outsourced manufacturing and track materials in partner locations
CONTRACT MANUFACTURING WORKFLOWS
Get the visibility you need when working with contractors
Katana gives you an overview of material usage and the statuses of your outsourced purchase orders.
- Issue purchase orders for outsourced manufacturing
- Track materials in your partner locations in real time
- Spot and purchase missing materials in contract suppliers’ locations
- Receive items to stock with accurate cost values
Financial visibility and cloud accounting
Sync your accounting, sales, and inventory with QBO or Xero
Seamlessly integrate Katana with your accounting software
- Send key financial data to accounting software like QuickBooks Online and Xero
- Ensure consistency between inventory and accounting records
- Create and update invoices based on sales orders in Katana
- Convert purchase orders in Katana to bills in one click
- Automatically keep your inventory balance up to date (QBO)
- Make precise pricing decisions based on your product margins
- Sync all your contact information to ensure consistent and accurate supplier and customer data
ACCURATE COSTING
Real-time reliable costing made easy
Ensure accuracy with costing features built for precision
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Make precise pricing decisions based on your product margins
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Track manufacturing costs based on your bill of materials (BOM) and production operations
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Create multilevel BOMs with subassemblies for accurate costing
PRODUCTION PLANNING
Routing and matrix BOMs for your variable products
Automate the reallocation of materials based on priorities you set
- Drag-and-drop priorities for manufacturing tasks
- Track availability for required materials for efficient sales order fulfillment
- Identify delay risks related to material supply lead times
- Get accurate expected completion dates to keep sales teams informed
- Have a live floor-level production status overview
REAL-TIME MASTER PLANNING
Production, scheduling, and
resource management in one place
Gain real-time visibility to optimize all your key resources
- Make accurate manufacturing and purchasing decisions with live data
- Ensure optimal inventory levels at all times
- Prioritize production based on raw material availability
- Get task-level control for effective shop floor management
- Automate manufacturing cost calculations based on your bill of materials and operations
TOTAL SHOP FLOOR CONTROL
Floor-level control from scheduling to task prioritization
Use the Katana Shop Floor App to align sales and production
- Send tasks to the app according to product operations for incoming manufacturing orders
- Assign and reassign jobs to operators who can start, pause, and resume tasks to keep you up to date on production
- View manufacturing order task and ingredient list for every task in the app
- Track time spent on tasks to optimize shop floor activities
- View resource consumption with live material tracking
- Add notes to manufacturing orders to be displayed for related tasks
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Scan barcodes with any smart device to monitor material usage and track batches and products
WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT
Optimized warehouse workflows
Gain stock visibility inside warehouses and simplify daily operator tasks
- Organize your warehouse by assigning default storage bins to products and materials
- Streamline picking/placing workflows and save time with the storage bin locations on PDF printouts
- Quickly identify products and materials through barcode scanning
- Reduce errors when receiving and counting stock
- Print barcode labels directly from your Katana account
KATANA INSIGHTS
Data-driven decisions with Katana Insights
Analyze and share insights for better collaboration and performance
- Track sales and profit margin trends over time
- Identify your most profitable products or product categories
- Identify your top clients and most successful sales channels
- Track your spending, lead times, and supplier performance
- Identify margin outliers to maximize profitability
- Recognize sales trends and risks to reprioritize items
- Understand your production costs and improvement/optimization areas
- Keep an eye on revenue, profit, costs, and average order values
CUSTOM WORKFLOWS VIA API
Katana’s open API and no-code solutions
Set up integrations and create workflows to streamline your operations
- Sync your Katana data with hundreds of e-commerce, shipping, accounting, and reporting platforms
- Build your own apps into Katana using our developer resources and open API
- Take advantage of apps that have been built into Katana on our open API
- Develop your custom workflows with Katana API
Organizing your business without manufacturing software is no longer a feasible option
With the recent rise in direct-to-consumer steel fabrication, manufacturing businesses are facing a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there are more opportunities to reach untapped markets than ever before – on the other, competition is fierce, and unless innovation is at the forefront, getting left in the dirt is a real possibility. ERP software, as such, helps manufacturers manage, scale, and ensure priorities are met through an easy to use solution.
Metal fabrication software ensures full inventory visibility
One of the largest challenges for a business is foolproof and accurate inventory management – especially in conjunction with keeping price ranges competitive. A manufacturing software solution like Katana is designed to give your company an inexpensive but supreme-quality tool to track, manage, and audit your inventory.
Katana gives you the ability to tap into your full inventory at the click of a button – this includes tracking items, stock, and material costs, thus ensuring that you always have the right amount of raw material available for production at any one time.
Metal fabrication software provides your business with live alerts when new products need to be manufactured, or when your raw material levels are getting low – this way you can always be prepared to replace diminishing stocks before they run out completely.
ERP software like Katana allows you to:
- Utilize priority-based material requirements planning – therefore avoiding stockouts
- Keep track of on-hand, committed, and expected stock levels
- Manage and organize product and material variants in one place
- Monitor resources and inventory across various warehouses
Eradicate waste and save money with metal fabrication software
Fabrication manufacturers often face similar problems; retention rates fluctuating, price ranges doing the same – ensuring a streamlined flow of raw materials and goods helps your avoid holding on too long to a certain product, or letting go of it when you may need it the most.
Manufacturing software provides you with the tools you need to accurately manage your resources and complete orders without ending up with leftover items – allowing your job costs to come crashing down. Integrate this software with hundreds of leading e-commerce and accounting tools, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for growth.
Katana’s fully-integrated solution makes it simple to:
- Connect enterprise resource planning ERP software with your manufacturing business
- Track your production process and manufacturing costs based on your bill of materials (BOM)
- Keep your eye on product cost and lead times without the need for manual data entry
- Make accurate pricing judgments based on your product margins
Metal fabrication software improves enterprise resource planning planning
ERP software for fabrication businesses is designed to help manufacturers streamline their operations and run much more efficiently – in part thanks to its ability to provide inventory control, as well as manage resources while delivering essential planning capabilities.
Manual data entry is always a risky move – it only takes one or two small typos to cause a big problem. By synching your business with Katana, you secure yourself in the knowledge that your production planning, as well as your order and sales activities, will run smoothly and without problems.
Management solutions like Katana allow you to:
- Drag-and-drop your production planning priorities
- Track your material requirements for efficient and accurate sales order fulfillment
- Identity delay risks in relation with inventory control and supply lead times
- Obtain accurate expected job completion dates in order to keep sales teams informed
Integrate enterprise resource planning software with the services you know and trust
Connect Katana with third-party e-commerce software, or design your own workflows via API
With a huge range of integrations to choose from, including e-commerce, accounting, CRM, and reporting – whatever you need to run your business smoothly can be handled by Katana. The fabrication business is a complex creature, but it need not be. Katana’s manufacturing software is built to fit into whatever internal software you use – and if a native integration isn’t available, you always have the option of creating your own workflow via API.
Check out the full list of integrations available here.
Essentially, metal fabrication software can be attributed to another name: ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning software.
This is a system designed to make manufacturing resource planning both simple and efficient. It allows companies to manage and overview all business functions directly or indirectly connected to metal fabrication. ERP software helps businesses to organize materials, production capacity, finances, a well as human resources.
One of the main features of metal fabrication software is its ability to connect many business processes and enable a coherent data flow between them. By assembling your organization’s data from multiple channels, the system can remove incorrect or duplicated information and provide you with a “one-stop-shop” for all manufacturing information.
The majority of ERP software includes management features for your company’s resources. Inventory management is an important part of industrial operations since it allows you to manage and track a variety of resources.
You may, for example, use resource planning software to keep track of how long it takes each supplier to fulfill your order – or to provide feedback on any concerns or complications with lead times.
This enables your business to quickly identify any delays or difficulties in its supply chain and prevent them from recurring.
ERP software is a powerful tool for any manufacturer looking to acquire more control over their production process. Engineering, finance, research and development, operations, and customer support teams, as well as outside suppliers, can all benefit from having on-demand access to real-time data.
Its ability to bring insight into departments that aren’t directly associated with manufacturing; but may still benefit from real-time information, such as engineering and finance, is what makes it special.
A resource planning system will assist your company in achieving a more optimized workflow and – as well as track several specifics such as inventory, labor, material requirements, and other resources required for manufacturing and production processes.
An effective metal fabrication software system will provide insight into departments that are not directly involved in manufacturing but are linked to it via the purchasing process.
Manufacturing managers and product owners can see how costs and capacities change and flow over time by having real-time data at their disposal, allowing them to modify their resource planning accordingly.
MRPs are an effective solution for manufacturers of any size looking to gain greater control over their production process. Teams within engineering, finance, research and development, operations, and customer service as well as outside suppliers all benefit from having access to real-time information on demand. What makes it unique is its ability to provide insight into departments that may not be directly involved with manufacturing but which could benefit from access to real-time information, such as engineering and finance departments.
An API, or Application Programming Interface, enables two apps to exchange data. They’re especially beneficial when native application integration isn’t possible.
Katana offers an open API, which means you can link apps made by other developers and corporations to Katana to guarantee that whatever software you’re already using works well with Katana from the start.
Connect your tools and build custom processes to help optimize your operations and sync inventory data with hundreds of native e-commerce, accounting, and reporting platforms.
You will only need to think about using an API if your platform doesn’t have a native integration with Katana. If you’re on a platform like Shopify, then you’re ready to click and go! Take a look at the list of integrations.