Katana

Avantages

- 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.

Inconvénients

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

Alternatives envisagées 

Zoho Inventory, NetSuite et MRPeasy

Pourquoi passer à Katana

It's easier to use, it's priced right, and it gives you what you need without a bunch of stuff you don't. Perfectly tailored for SMB/SME manufacturers.

Avantages

The user interface is clean and very intuitive, requiring essentially no time to learn. Some of the other MRP solutions we tried were difficult to navigate and use, and training on them would have been labor intensive and costly. Katana is beautifully designed, and the batch-tracking and inventory management is easy to adapt to our business (MRPeasy/ERPAG were very clearly not designed with food manufacturing in mind, so making them even remotely functional for that purpose felt like a bit of a fools errand, whereas Katana just works).

Inconvénients

While it is very user-friendly and it has the ability to track batches/lots (which is critical for us), we've had to develop workarounds to make it function the way we need it to -- it doesn't quite handle this the way I would envision it should. There are also some minor time wasters. If there's one simple feature I wish they would change, it's being able to type in the expiration dates rather than having to scroll through the calendar manually to select the correct date. This becomes so onerous when receiving multiple items on a PO and having to manually click through/scroll through the calendar to select the correct date as opposed to simply having a field that allows you to type in the date and move on.

Alternatives envisagées 

ERPAG, Fishbowl et MRPeasy

Pourquoi passer à Katana

Katana is a great small business solution that I can easily see growing with us. Fishbowl is cost-prohibitive (and honestly at this point, I'd rather just use Katana). MRPeasy and ERPAG are not as well designed and don't work well as a food industry solution -- they made simple tasks feel like running through a maze. The developers at Katana did a beautiful job of creating something intuitively designed that works well across multiple industries while also making it as clean and aesthetic as it is functional. It's a pleasure to use. I've noticed that they also seem to be regularly implementing improvements and updates, which is awesome. Customer support is friendly and responsive. Highly recommend.

Avantages

The interface is intuitive. The pricing seems okay.

Inconvénients

This software is seriously lacking features. For all those who wrote reviews saying they love the software, I want to know what industry they work in and how they use the app. It doesnt offer very basic features. You can't bulk edit, you literally need to upload an excel sheet if you want to change several products. There are no images for your products. How does it not support images? This is basic database stuff. And currently, you can only manufacture items from one location! Who's rating this software as great?!

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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

Alternatives envisagées 

ERPNext

Pourquoi choisir Katana 

Easy, simple and focus on MRP.

Logiciel antérieur 

Odoo

Pourquoi passer à Katana

Simple and Very focus, easy to connect with Shopify and Quickbook.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Alternatives envisagées 

Orderhive

Pourquoi passer à Katana

Katana was much more suited to our needs in terms of the receipt creation features for each product. The interface was also much simpler than the alternative products we considered.