Katana Cloud Inventory

The best for small manufacturing

Vorteile:

KatanaMRP has really helped me know what to order, and when to order it, as well as plan what comes next in manufacturing. It even lets me add time to tasks in production so I can monetarily make sure employees are being efficient enough for my company to remain profitable. Definitely recommend. I wish I would have found them sooner.

Nachteile:

Sometimes the app logs me out and I have to put the information in twice.

First Impression KATANA - perfect fit for smaller companies which do not need a complex ERP-system

Kommentare: For our requirements, set-up and company size the best we could find and test!
We will manage inventory/warehouse with 5000+ items, handle products with ingredients & operations, edit quotes, generate sales orders and mark received orders as shipped for automated invoice generation in Quickbooks. The cloud-based concept and the reduced complexity combined with an intuitivbe operatzion makes this SW easy to install and to work with if you have a team in different geographic locatioopns (as we have).
Set-up of KATANA is absolutely simple, mostl yself-explanatory and can be done by any "power-user" without need of (expensive) external ERP-consultants.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Scrappy startup quality at enterprise rates

Kommentare: Now at the money grabbing stage before they implode, would be my guess. Clunky at the best of times. We put up with quirks, bugs that were never going to get fixed and general major omissions (like lack of back up and undo) This company is being run like it's an open source "best effort" outfit, but charging premium monthly rates for a software that feels barely out of beta. Given how central MRP/ERP/etc is to our business, we will be looking for a different provider asap, as none of this inspires trust in what should be a long term partner

Vorteile:

The user interface is pretty and nice to use, mostly The concepts of scheduling and general "idea" behind the katana system are good

Nachteile:

The endless bugs and now pricing issues. No backup, no undo, and again, lots of bugs. We regularly have to contact support with issues in their system. Most of the time the response is "oh we'll put it on our voting system, if it gets votes we'll fix it", which really is not what I expect from a system that costs several hundred dollars a month, before addons and users. To be perfectly honest, we were making do - the pros of not having to build this kind of system ourselves outweighed the cons. That has now changed. What triggered this review is that they doubled the price of our plan, turned off a number of features we were using to run our business operations, and charged us for "add-ons" all without warning. We did get sent an email, warning us of an upcoming change in billing (note this email was sent 28 days before the change...). That email said someone would reach out to us to discuss transitioning. That did not happen, and instead they just turned things off and billed our card for add-ons we never agreed to. Forced onboarding (billable of course) with an "expert" is a bit of a joke

Katana is great!

Vorteile:

The set up and use of Katana is super easy and user friendly! The online resources they provide are incredibly helpful. I found the Katana Academy videos the most helpful.

Nachteile:

Katana does not provide a way to "waste" products, however I know that Katana is currently working on implementing a program to do this. The only true complaint is that it doesn't support fractions. Our products are divided into 12 and when inputting the "recipes and boms" 1 is not divisible by 12 evenly. This makes us have to stock adjust to get proper inventory counts.

Exactly What Our Growing Business Needed.

Kommentare: So far, we are really liking hoe easy it was to setup and get running. The inventory management has improved the flow and processes in our company for the better.

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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