About Katana
Real-time master planning — Katana automatically follows the stock movements across the production cycle and in multiple warehouses to help you maintain optimal inventory levels. You can also build BOMs and product recipes to manage materials and keep an eye on availability for your make-to-order workflows or fulfill the order from available product stock.
Live inventory management and full traceability — Prioritize orders in Katana and track the availability of raw materials and finished goods in real-time. Features like batch or lot tracking ensure end-to-end traceability of materials and products from production to post-sale. Quickly identify products and materials and keep track of materials and batch numbers when receiving, consuming, or counting goods.
Total shop floor control — Receive real-time manufacturing insights in Katana's Shop Floor App. Easily create, set up, and remove shop floor operators while tracking manufacturing costs based on product recipes and production operations.
Integrations and open API — Katana connects to popular e-commerce, accounting, CRM, and reporting service providers such as Shopify, eBay, Amazon, WooCommerce, Xero, and QuickBooks Online to streamline your operations. You can also set up custom workflows with Katana's open API or connect to hundreds of third-party integrations via Integromat and Zapier.
Katana pricing
Katana does not have a free version but does offer a free trial. Katana paid version starts at US$99.00/month.
Alternatives to Katana
Katana Reviews
Feature rating
- Industry: Warehousing
- Company size: 2-10 Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
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.
Reasons for Choosing Katana
ease of use and training of usersSwitched From
DEAR SystemsResponse from Katana MRP
Thank you for the feedback and support!
- Industry: Food & Beverages
- Company size: 2-10 Employees
- Used Daily for 1-5 months
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Review Source
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.
Reasons for Switching to 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.- Industry: Retail
- Company size: 2-10 Employees
- Used for Free Trial
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Review Source
I dont understand all the great reviews
Pros
The interface is intuitive. The pricing seems okay.
Cons
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?!
Response from Katana MRP
As a fast growing software, we understand the concerns you have with Katana. At our current development speed, all of the mentioned lacking features are made available by the end of this year. Hope you will give us another chance!
- Industry: Food Production
- Company size: 2-10 Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
The MRP system I wish I'd always had
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.
Reasons for Switching to 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.- Industry: Consumer Goods
- Company size: 2-10 Employees
- Used Daily for 1-5 months
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Review Source
Very Useful
The overall experience has been excellent so far. Katana has helped us transition away from using spreadsheets to track our manufacturing operations and really professionalise our processes. It's an integral part of our everyday operations.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
