Katana Manufacturing ERP Features

This software has a fantastic feel to make working in it incredibly efficient. As a person that works with software/web design/development, I can appreciate the attention paid to this incredibly complex platform.

There isn't much we don't like. Most of the small things are already in the development cycle and they include small things like being able to customize Katana a bit more for our specific needs. Column order, custom fields, field mapping of API connections, etc.

- It's really easy to use - Makes it easy to track materials on hand, reorder, etc - Calculates margin including labor cost - Xero integration works perfectly - Zapier integration makes it really flexible from an automation standpoint - Really lots of other stuff ... it's truly an excellent product and an outlier in a pretty clunky space.

It can be a little slow, and the contact syncing could be more robust.

I love the simplicity of Katana and the ease of inventory management. This software has saved us so much time and offers way more than other products we looked into. For a small business with lots of moving parts and inventory to manage, Katana makes everything a breeze.

N/a, Katana meets and exceeds all our needs!

Clear process: Order fulfillment, Purchasing, Manufacturing and Inventory Control.

Don't have kitting BOM (Combo product). Format of Currency is bad, it's difficult to read.

The simple progression from Items to Buy, Make, and Stock to Sell makes it easy for me to maintain best practices in tracking my inventory. The flexibility in making stock adjustments made transitioning easy from confusions in my previous software into an ongoing accounting of what I have. Likewise, integrating with Shopify and Quicken was seamless.

A more complete inclusion of customer information from Shopify would be useful.

Thank you for the support!

The ability to use Resources as a way to assign a specific person to each task so I can see who is working on what step of the manufacturing process and the allotted time they are provided for the task. This year we went from contract labor/paid-per-piece to employees/hourly-wage and Katana has made this a much smoother transition then it could have been. Having both "cost-per-piece" for assembly of items as well as "cost-per-minute" has given us the ability to compare former payment procedures with what to expect per hour from employees.

There are a variety of tasks that were unable to be done when we began using Katana in January 2019 but I am thrilled to say that most of them have been developed. The developers listen and are very attentive to requests, bug reports, and ideas and so despite the fact that some of the features were not available (exporting reports, importing recipes, bulk print MOs/pick lists, etc.) they have added...

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Thank you for very thorough feedback! Love to have you growing with us!

Handling of inventory, items, products, ingredients, sales orders - all this is handled in a very efficient, clear and easy to use way. Makes the difference compared to many alternative MRP-/ERP-systems. Connector to QuickBooks with automatic trigger for invoices in QB once the products are marked as shipped in KATANA. Connector to Shopify for on-line sale of spare parts. 100% helpful and open minded customer service - very helpful in helping to understand all features and finding the best workflow for specific situations.

There are some functions/features which need improvement, e.g. the customization of documents such as Quotations so every company can generate a set of individual template to serve different areas (machines, spare parts, service,..). 3-5 custom fields for Quotes/Sales Orders/Products would be helpful. Althoug KATANA is intended to be a MRP-system it would be helpful to integrate SERVICE-articles (not only MAKE or BUY articles). This would allow to add a possible service portion to a spare parts quote. Dedicated Delivery Notes (with partial shipments) would be a great feature.

Thank you! Glad you are getting value out of Katana.

Very simple user-interface Was able to set it up quickly and efficiently Continual feature upgrades Simple integration with Shopify & QuickBooks Very responsive customer service Detailed, but not overwhelming

The upload from Excel was clunky and not helpful. It was faster to just enter in the data directly. There are features I look forward to having but that are not currently available. I know their team will be releasing them in the next year.

Thank you for the feedback!

Very easy to use without cluttered interface. This was my biggest selling point when comparing Katana to other similar products. Everything is so well organised and easy to glance over, while still offering nearly everything that I need for myself. I also like that any changes in the inventory are immediately reflected in open orders. This is true for everything that I've used so far; as soon as I make a change in one area, it instantly reflects in all others as well.

I'm missing one feature, but it's more due to the specific nature of my business. It would be great if I could organize my inventory not just by total combined weight, but broken down into individual units as well. For example, if my order requires 500g of plastic in one piece, but I have two separate pieces of 250g each, Katana will show that I have enough resources, even though I can't fill my order since I need one unbroken piece. I've already got in touch with their support about this and they've said my request was put on their wish list, so I'm fairly confident it will eventually get implemented.

Thank you for choosing Katana!

I love the value. We were stuck using excel to manage our inventory for a long time because there were no affordable options until Katana came along. I am able to maintain accurate stock levels much more easily now.

There are a few minor inconveniences that are small time wasters. One example is not being able to shift/ctrl click multiple items and drag them around as a group when reorganizing priority rank of manufacturing orders. Since we have multilevel subassemblies I spend more time dragging around manufacturing orders to organize the order I want them completed in and I could save some time if I could drag items around as a group.

Chris, thank you for sharing your experience with Katana!

It's great to be able to log in on any computer without having to install software, and it's done an amazing job of keeping our inventory tidy and up-to-date. The Purchase Order generator has also made us look very professional to our suppliers. The integration with Shopify is also a huge plus to us as it prevents us from having to manually transfer Shopify orders and automatically removes all parts from the BOM from our inventory. Highly recommended!

There aren't many, if any things we've come up against yet that Katana didn't support.

Thank you for the feedback!

This software legitimately changed the way my business runs. It keeps me accountable for the hundreds of supplies I use on a daily basis and keeps me organized in a way that no lists, or other apps, ever have.

I can honestly say nothing, this app works so seamlessly and wonderfully. Maybe the load speeds can be a little laggy, but that's mostly because I have a lot of materials I've input. Definitely not an app downfall or issue at all.

Thank you for the support!

Katana has multiple features which have very useful in improving our manufacturing processes. The ability to create recipes for each product has been a huge help for us as we have quite a lot of raw materials in each finished product. The Shop Floor app has been brilliant for us to track production/assembly time more accurately. This has been a great help in pinpointing an accurate cost per unit.

The only aspect that hasn't met our expectations so far has been the batch tracking feature. This is an excellent feature and one that would be so helpful for us. However, we need it to work automatically with our Shopify orders and at the moment sales orders can only be attributed to particular batches if you fulfil them on the Katana dashboard. We need this to happen automatically when our Shopify orders are fulfilled.

Inventory and order management systems were relatively new to us when we started with our company. We evaluated and tested several web-based tools and Katana was by far the most user friendly. The interface is clean and initiative, which helped us to get up and running quickly and confidently.

There are some features and reporting that we would like to have that haven’t been rolled out yet (particularly around customer information) and we spent time tinkering around and then ultimately asking customer support about it. They have been very helpful and we are waiting for the enhancements.

Ease of use, support, inventory management features, able to create builds/recipes for products (BOM), ability to upload data using Excel, integration with Quickbooks Online

Cost, certain features do not make sense in the implementation.

Ease of Use Easy Implementation Customer Service Reorder Options

I wouldn't say this is a con- but we are really excited for the bar code scanning option they plan to roll out in 2021!

Thank you for your review! We are excited to have you as a customer.

Just completed the free 14 day trial of Katana and have now begun a paid subscription. It took a few days and a bit of frustration to manually add all our products, ingredients, recipes, and current pending wholesale orders from outside of shopify, but having the shopify integration helped a lot. We use three different wholesale platforms (Faire, tundra & Abound), none of which offer automated third...

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Glitches with accurate purchase prices showing up in overall product list. Described it to customer service and they denied it being a problem. That’s the only problem I’ve encountered so far. Tbh on customer support quality.

Hi! Thank you for your feedback and we'll make sure to work out any glitches that have occurred along the way. Happy making!

Katana integrates with my Shopify Site very easily and makes bundling products on my Shopify so much easier to track. We also make candles and kits in house. Katana makes tracking inventory so much easier allowing me to know without guess or counting my materials how much of any particular object I can produce at any given time.

It would be nice if there were barcodes, but I hear feature is coming soon. It would also be nice if I sell out of an object that is apart of a bundle that it would then make the bundle unavailable on my shopify site. I believe this is also in the works.

Thank you for the review! Indeed, both mentioned features are on our roadmap.

It is intuitive and easy to implement. I like that you can prioritize builds so if we are short on product I can customize which particular build for it to go to.

I wish we could add materials to sales orders. Sometimes we sell different parts and it would be nice to add those to a sales order.

I love this software because of the ease of use and the workflow methodology. The drill down ability for stock and manufactured items are great. We have managed to get a lot more information on staff productivity through exporting complete manufacture orders data and reporting. I also love it that support is real and that I now know some of the team personally. They answer queries fast and efficiently.

All the current issues I have are in development. For example: 1. Adding landing costs to purchase order items 2. Multi Currency 3. Back Order information

Thank you for the feedback and support!

Super easy to use, pricing is more clear and streamlined than when we started. Support is great; not always the quickest but 1-2 days usually gets us a thorough and well covered answer to our questions. You can send them suggestions and they will tally in to their dev schedule. Saves a lot of time and nice to be able to access it from any computer.

There currently (2020) is no option to add fixed costs to POs. This makes tracking cost of inventory a little tougher. I also cannot edit PO templates. Having these features would make cost tracking and insurance claims easier. There is also no support for contractor per unit manufacturing but a simple way to get around this would be to set contractor tasks and payment by the hour and make each unit take 1 hour to finish. This does though make it difficult to track time if you need to track how long production will take. Fortunately we have a good idea of how long something will take without the help of Katana.

Thank you for your feedback and glad to see you are getting value from Katana. We have also noted down your suggestions.

The support is always helpful - they've been quick to answer and they have always been able to answer our questions. We've had this app for about 2 months now, and we are loving it. The adjustment was fairly simple and easy for staff, importing our data was easy and straight forward for setup.

Would be great if we could count inventory via barcode scanner instead of manually entering qty's and then importing.

Improved our ability to track shared ingredients for the products we sell. Easy to know what quantity of ingredients to buy and who to buy it from. Connects to Shopify and updates automatically. Amazing customer support.

It took some time to learn the software and create ingredients for each product - but is worth while.

Thank you!

Clean interface, well organized and thought out and modern in its features. Integrates well with lots of other software I use, including Quickbooks and Shopify. Customer service is absolutely top notch, and the tutorials are very helpful.

If you have zero experience with MRPs like I did, it may take you a little while to figure everything out. But the customer service team really goes above and beyond to answer any questions and walk you through anything you're having issues with. If there was one feature I wish was available that is not currently, it's barcode scanner integration. That would make updating my inventory and adding new knives to inventory much easier.

Thank you for the review and support! We are surely working on enabling barcode scanning soon.