Katana Manufacturing ERP Reviews

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.

Very poor MRP overrated in reviews, with good service

Comments: Very easy to start. Lack of a lot of important functionalities by the time of use. Overpriced by the functions provided.

Pros:

Customer Service and easy to use at the beginning

Cons:

It appears to be that the designers and programmers have never worked in a company. *No discounts or price difeerentiation*Lack of point of sales*Very low scanning functionality*Not differentiated user rights*No history of document changes*Buggy

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.

Intuitive, Fast To Implement, and Beautifully Designed

Pros:

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).

Cons:

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.

Most affordable MRP system for small manufacturers

Comments: Katana has been extremely responsive with receiving feedback on the product and working in product improvements based on that feedback. There have already been multiple issues I had with the product early on that they have reacted to feedback on and implemented changes. Great customer service.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

A critical piece of our business that we can't live without

Comments: I love it. I've had great interactions with everyone on the team, and I can tell they want to help me succeed. Thanks Katana!

Pros:

Great value, probably the only affordable cloud solution on the market

Cons:

It's a great piece of software for data entry. Not so great when it comes to using that data to run your business. No dashboards or views that provide insights. They've solved for this by integrating with Easy-Insight and Stocktrim. Now that those are in place, I'm completely satisfied.

Great Inventory Software

Comments: Knowing the real numbers of what I have in stock, what I need to order, how much it will cost me, and how much profit I will accrue is essential for making it to next year. In Katana, these figures are easy to find and keep up with. If I have a question, support is quick to respond and helpful. They are a great company to deal with!

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Met our needs at beginning, as needs grew Katana team listened and added features

Comments: We maintain about 1500-2000 SKUS and all assemblers work at home. Some do different steps, returning work weekly and then having it distributed to the next person. Giving every MO an actual number has kept every bag of parts and supplies organized. We can track who has it, where it's at in the manufacturing process, etc. Even though we have used Katana since January, it's the last 3 months that it's really proven it's value to us. We do not use it for order fulfillment, just in-house manufacturing. But it's allowed us to prep for holiday season from July forward and stay completely organized and efficient. No more "where-did-it-go" or "how-many-have-we-prepped" frantic moments. We began the year knowing we needed a software that "fit" our company's size and our needs. Katana has proven invaluable for our company this year. We are currently doing our first complete inventory and we hope to add these numbers to Katana in 2020 and continue to improve our efficiency.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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 these and the software continues to grow. The next feature I'd love to see is the ability to have a product photo attached to each product that prints out an image with the MO. Also, we have some items "on hold" (not sent to distribution center yet) and we use Resources to specify ONHOLD-BIN221 etc. to know the status of any particular SKU completed. We'd prefer not to use different locations, but rather have the ability to add a couple more "status" options. Either a misc or a custom. For now, everything on hold gets marked BLOCKED status and then the Resource is used to say it's on hold in whatever bin.

I like it a lot!

Comments: I life it a lot it helpdesk me with complaint execution

Pros:

It can be merclged with many other softwares i use

Cons:

Only one user per acount at any time is annoying

Great choice for small manufacturer

Comments: I tried several different MRPs before settling with Katana. Some were too clunky, others too expensive, complicated and elaborate. I felt a bit like Goldilocks. Katana was just right. Reasonably priced. Integrating with Quickbooks and Shopify was simple and efficient. The set up was fast. I no longer have to duplicate data entry onto multiple systems. This saves me times and I don't lose track of orders or inventory. I especially like the instant chat feature with their customer service reps. I can leave a quick message or screenshot of a problem and within a day or so, I have a response back and my problem resolved. No need to hire an expensive consultant, anyone could set up Katana and run it.

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.

Smooth Operator

Comments: It has been great, highly recommend for small to medium business. Very user friendly!

Pros:

Katana has made our day to day business so much more fluid and stress free. It was easy to build out the product lines, upload product sku's and flip the switch on going live. Game changer!

Cons:

On the production schedule front, hoping that the software will eventually lump all the tasks together, I have multiple consumers that order the same item, each order is its own line item instead of being lumped into a group, so our production team needs to scrub the tasks before production starts as to make sure they capture each item, as to not create redunancy in work.

Love the functionality!

Pros:

This software is very user friendly compared to some other, more detailed programs.

Cons:

I had some issue with the conversions during the product builds, so I am not sure if you could have multiple conversions for a product.

Katana boosted our confidence as new business owners!

Comments: Great! Service has been very helpful, and we’ve been able to do everything we need to do. Looking forward to seeing Katana grow and deploy more functions!

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Manufacturing superstar

Comments: We went over many manufacturing software, but Katana is the best so far.

Pros:

- easiness of navigation and implementation - support - the colour coding

Cons:

- not sure how to upload documents - not being able to add multiple sale and purchase accounts - not being able to ship partial sale orders

Most Intuitive MRP Ever

Comments: Overall it's simple to setup, simple to use, and while not quite polished, does everything we need in a hugely user friendly way.

Pros:

I was looking for a solution for seasonal manufacturing workers that we don't have time to get up to speed with some complex MRP - Kanata's UI is the most intuitive interface out of any MRP I was able to find. The ease of re-prioritising jobs, and the automatic stock refactoring is awesome, and the team are really, really responsive to feature ideas and issues. Seamless integrations with WooCommerce makes supplying orders to customers super easy.

Cons:

It doesn't quite have everything we need, some of which I though we're quite base (Bin Locations, Supplier Product Codes, Purchase Orders that email directly to suppliers), but all of those have work arounds, and I'm assured are planned for future development.

Inventory and Sales Simplified

Comments: Excellent. Everything about using Katana has been great. The team there walked me through the product and helped me set it up. They answer questions quickly and personally. The product is as-described and thoroughly game-changing for my business. There is strong value, we have much less waste and mistakes in our ordering now.

Pros:

I love the deep inventory tracking and that it feels like a modern app. Inventory software is typically painful to use, and Katana is a breeze. I love that Shopify sales are automatically imported and function live with Shopify, so when you fulfil an order in Shopify it automatically fulfils it in Katana. The Quickbooks integration makes generating invoices simple. You only have to do things once when you use Katana, there's no need to fill in the same info in different services over and over. Tracking inventory in Katana in multiple locations, and being able to include the ingredients of each product in the tracking is also a plus.

Cons:

When creating purchase orders, it can generate a Bill in Quickbooks. This is helpful, however I'd love to be able to create a Purchase Order in QB so that I can simply track them all.

Katana for manufacturing

Comments: Lots of potential Katana, it a emerging system sure it doesn't have the xero integration in play atm but like my own business Katana is also growing so I like that I have partner with a operating system that going through similar growing pains as we are. if you have a manufacturing process you wish to have better control of I recommend exploring this system.

Pros:

I have been operating my business using excel, xero, monday.com and email. After searching for a system that could centralise my focus I came across Katana which in essence consolidates all the previous mentioned systems into one interface which saves me a tonne of time. secondly the customer support, I have had a lengthy skype call with Hannes who is a founder of Katana where by he provided a demo session of how the software will be suitable for my business needs. I really valued to the bespoke service which ensured I got off to the right start.

Cons:

The intergration to Xero is in development but this has been the most noteable con to date, that said Katana is working on this and it should be available shortly

Easy to use and helpful

Pros:

It takes some time to set up and deploy, but once it's running, its super helpful! Its very easy to generate POs, update stock levels, and track sales and make orders. All the function without the bloated junk that expensive and advanced MRP systems have.

Cons:

I wish there was a way to have a negative stock variant (a single product that represents a product subtraction rather than having to make a full copy of a product recipe minus that one single item). I wish there was a way to group materials without having to create a separate product for them. Each product will generate a separate make order, but sometimes Its not actually something that can be made individually, it just represents all the parts that make up an assembly. There is currently no way to make a group of materials that does not become its own product that the system thinks needs to be made as its own inventory item.

Amazing Software!

Pros:

I love how easy it is to keep track of our inventory, and easily order more materials. It is easy to navigate and very user-friendly. You can easily see how much material you have in stock, and Katana warns you when stock is running low. Never again will I run out of what I need! Customer service is very outstanding as well, I have asked them multiple questions and they always get back quickly with a well detailed response. Love it!

Cons:

Honestly cannot think of any cons about this software, I have not had any problems out of it.

Great Value for Small Manufacturing Businesses

Comments: The overall experience has been a positive one. It does well what is promised, and the support team is helpful while also listening to feedback for future improvements.

Pros:

The price makes Katana most attractive. It is also intuitive to set up and use. Katana also provided helpful onboarding assistance.

Cons:

The software is a bit limited with respect to features for or customization of PO's.

Katana

Comments: It's been really helpful to keep track of our production and inventory. Once was very useful to check out margins considering operation, but this info got confused at some point, so we are trying to resolve it so we can once again trust what appears on the software.

Pros:

It's really easy to setup and use. It gives you just the right information about your products and the automatization of any changes you make in processes is very useful and convenient.

Cons:

I've encounter a lot of bugs that are quickly fixed, but interfere with projects and daily work. The margins and costs info is a little untrustworthy and hard to read when looking for errors. The software doesn't consider quantity of people actually making the production, only hours, so if we work with extra hands is really hard to setup time lines for our weekly throughout.

Katana is great for inventory and stock adjustments!

Comments: Overall the pros definitely out weigh the cons (at least for our business) so we're very pleased.

Pros:

I really like that I'm able to save my product's SOPs and can easily find them when I need to make more! It is very handy to have that feature. I also enjoy that after I have made the product, I can add the inventory through a stock adjustment. It's a very simple process that is not convoluted. Big fan!

Cons:

The only thing that I don't love is when I am doing a stock adjustment I have to do the math on each item to get it to the correct total. For example: If I start the week with 35 of a specific item and throughout the week, say, 17 get purchased, when I do inventory and account for that, I have to use the calculator to figure out 35 -17 = correct total. And I have to do that math for each individual item.

Transformational for our business!!!

Comments: It has been transformational for our business and looking forward to keep growing powered by Katana!

Pros:

Simple to use, comprehensive functionalities and above all highly flexible to fit our DTC and made to order workflow.

Cons:

Inventory reporting can be improved with standard analytics

Katana is a must-have for all startups that handle inventory and their own production.

Comments: Setting up an entire supply chain with little or no experience can be difficult, but Katana has made it straight forward. We've not only learned to control our production much better, but we also managed to improve from the understanding we gained.

Pros:

If you use Shopify, than you can easily integrate and sync with Katana. As a very valuable side-effect we got a MUCH better understanding of the overall production activities and their cost. Katana also helps you with reminders of when to purchase certain items in order to keep your delivery dates.

Cons:

As someone who have not been in control of production and inventory before, I would have appreciated a free trial that where 4 weeks and not 2 weeks. That said, we asked for some extra time and we got a longer test period.