Katana Manufacturing ERP

The best for small manufacturing

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

The MRP system I wish I'd always had

Comments: Katana's awesome, full stop. I've been working with manufacturing businesses for years, and for years I've lamented Xero's relatively weak inventory management system. Two years ago I tried literally every MRP app I could find to plugin to Xero; they were all pretty bad. Along comes Katana, which maybe was around earlier but was "new to me" just this year, and ... wow. Mostly, it Just Works. The Xero integration works seamlessly for bills and sales orders, which speeds AP/AR quite a bit. 90% of the tool's value is outside of Xero though, and I now have a permanently-pinned Katana tab in my browser for tracking everything in the production flow from raw materials purchasing, to production, to sale, to reconciliation of remaining materials and product stock. It's great. Is it perfect? Not quite. They need to do some performance work, as load times are often a little sluggish. Also, it would be nice to see finer-grained automation, and better contact syncing. But overall, I'm delighted.

Pros:

- 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.

Cons:

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

It's a good start

Pros:

We like having the ability to make manufacture orders so everyone involved can see what's been planned and when it's due. The ability to prioritize orders is very helpful for assigning inventory.

Cons:

Identifying products that are ready to ship on each order is cumbersome. Our customer service team has to click individually into each order to see if any items are ready to ship. There's no way to easily flip to the next order. You have to close that window & click on the next order. It would be nice if you could at least toggle between orders within an order window. We'd also love to see some kind of drop down or hover-over feature that would quickly show you if partial shipments are available.

Promised so much delivered far short of what we hoped

Comments: Disappointed. They are pretending this software is the best thing since sliced bread and its more like a stale baguette.

Pros:

It works on a basic level for stock management and also bills of materials.

Cons:

It fails to have any sort of calender or gantt chart. It also fails terribly with time planning/recording of how long a task can take. For example you can't even put into the system that you start your working day at half past the hour only full hours are allowed. Further to the time planning side you can not block out time for holidays or meetings. Making this software useless to plan your time and give acreate lead times to customers.

Katana is Great for small business

Comments: Its easy to use, our warehouse knows exactly what to do and when which is great. Ordering is relatively easy so from an inventory standpoint I think its great. I think there is a lot of room for improvement in basically every other facet this software says it can deliver.

Pros:

Its easy to use as both a user and an admin. Low learning curve with a high return of success.

Cons:

Its really unintuitive for me at least to communicate with my users with the shop floor app. Im better off getting up and takinf the time to talk to them directly rather than leaving them notes and vice versa. Also the reports NEVER work, ive never been able to pull a report or print a packing slip for whatever reason (the link always dies) thankfully I also keep up to date on our accounting software so I can pull the report from there otherwise Id probably rate this lower.