Katana Cloud Inventory Erfahrungen

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Odoo

Warum Katana Cloud Inventory gewählt wurde

ease of use and training of users

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Dynamics 365 und Sage 100

Warum Katana Cloud Inventory gewählt wurde

Due to a downsizing in manufacturing we decided to look for a faster, more flexible, less complicated MRP-system which is cloud-based and would have good and propven interfaces to a standard accounting SW and to an on-line shop (spare parts).

Zuvor genutzte Software

Dynamics 365 und Sage 100

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Katana Cloud Inventory

Simplicity with at the same time well covered basic features, ease of use, intuitive, cloud-based.

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

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

MRPeasy

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.

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Zoho CRM, QuickBooks Online Advanced und QuickBooks Enterprise

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Katana Cloud Inventory

Ease of use and the features. And it looks good.

Vorteile

Ease of Use
Easy Implementation
Customer Service
Reorder Options

Nachteile

I wouldn't say this is a con- but we are really excited for the bar code scanning option they plan to roll out in 2021!

Vorteile

Its very very easy to use. Having used other systems, like inFlow, it has refreshing clean visually cued interface. Its very satisfying to use.

Nachteile

Very little - I would ask why they dont allow non-stock items to be a thing (we cant be the only ones!) - we have to make up that we have 1000s of imaginary non-stock items to keep the system happy. But its a tiny weeny gripe and has very little bearing on anything.

Vorteile

I love the simplicity of Katana and the ease of inventory management. This software has saved us so much time and offers way more than other products we looked into. For a small business with lots of moving parts and inventory to manage, Katana makes everything a breeze.

Nachteile

N/a, Katana meets and exceeds all our needs!

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Odoo und Zoho Inventory

Warum Katana Cloud Inventory gewählt wurde

Zoho was consistently inaccurate and needed to to work with other Zoho products for full functionality.

Zuvor genutzte Software

Zoho Inventory

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Katana Cloud Inventory

Gave us everything that we needed.

Vorteile

Katana delivers a lot of value. It fully covers my MRP needs while being affordable to a scaling business.

Nachteile

I would also like an option to dropship the products that I make for clients and I don't see a way to do that.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

QuickBooks Online und Zendesk Suite

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Katana Cloud Inventory

Better functionality for custom made products. More affordable.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

ERPNext

Warum Katana Cloud Inventory gewählt wurde

Easy, simple and focus on MRP.

Zuvor genutzte Software

Odoo

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Katana Cloud Inventory

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

It's helped us streamline inventory management, manufacturing orders and inventory orders. Highly recommend!

Nachteile

It was a significantly more money than what we were paying with our old system but the extra money has been so worth it for us.

Vorteile

Very easy to use without cluttered interface. This was my biggest selling point when comparing Katana to other similar products. Everything is so well organised and easy to glance over, while still offering nearly everything that I need for myself.

I also like that any changes in the inventory are immediately reflected in open orders. This is true for everything that I've used so far; as soon as I make a change in one area, it instantly reflects in all others as well.

Nachteile

I'm missing one feature, but it's more due to the specific nature of my business. It would be great if I could organize my inventory not just by total combined weight, but broken down into individual units as well.

For example, if my order requires 500g of plastic in one piece, but I have two separate pieces of 250g each, Katana will show that I have enough resources, even though I can't fill my order since I need one unbroken piece.

I've already got in touch with their support about this and they've said my request was put on their wish list, so I'm fairly confident it will eventually get implemented.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

QuickBooks Online Advanced, QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Enterprise und QuickBooks Online

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Katana Cloud Inventory

Ease of use and interface

Vorteile

I loved the user interface and the ease of working with the system. The system is very intuitive and with the instructional videos you can pretty much pick up the basics very quickly. I love the way that you can upload information through Excel and the system is flexible with the upload. Also the seamless integration with Quickbooks online is very nice.

Nachteile

One of the features that is missing, but they are working on it, is sales forecasting by SKU. This would be a great feature to add as it will allow us to add our expected sales for each SKU and have the system forecast demand. Another issue is when you have a price rule for a client in QuickBooks Katana has no way to see this, so when the invoice is pushed to QuickBooks you have to go through each individual line to accept the price rule. Not a game changer, but a bit of a hassle.

Vorteile

Super easy to use, pricing is more clear and streamlined than when we started. Support is great; not always the quickest but 1-2 days usually gets us a thorough and well covered answer to our questions. You can send them suggestions and they will tally in to their dev schedule. Saves a lot of time and nice to be able to access it from any computer.

Nachteile

There currently (2020) is no option to add fixed costs to POs. This makes tracking cost of inventory a little tougher. I also cannot edit PO templates. Having these features would make cost tracking and insurance claims easier. There is also no support for contractor per unit manufacturing but a simple way to get around this would be to set contractor tasks and payment by the hour and make each unit take 1 hour to finish. This does though make it difficult to track time if you need to track how long production will take. Fortunately we have a good idea of how long something will take without the help of Katana.

Vorteile

Just completed the free 14 day trial of Katana and have now begun a paid subscription. It took a few days and a bit of frustration to manually add all our products, ingredients, recipes, and current pending wholesale orders from outside of shopify, but having the shopify integration helped a lot. We use three different wholesale platforms (Faire, tundra & Abound), none of which offer automated third party integrations, so we knew we’d have to manually input orders and Katana serves that purpose as our centralized dashboard to see what needs to go out, when, from which platform, if we have it in stock, when we can make it, etc. In two weeks, we’ve already seen an increase in production efficiency and decrease in wholesale turnaround times now that EVERYTHING is being tracked in one place. Highly recommend Katana if you’re a maker, it’s never too early to implement automated systems in your biz!

Nachteile

Glitches with accurate purchase prices showing up in overall product list. Described it to customer service and they denied it being a problem. That’s the only problem I’ve encountered so far. Tbh on customer support quality.

Vorteile

The setup is quick and easy and the customer service is nothing short of excellent. We love the simple interface which makes it easy to train others on,. The Excel templates allow for bulk uploads of all of the required data categories which doesn't need to be uploaded manually.

Nachteile

It could be more circular in that you sometimes have to jump back and forth within the system to complete a task. The production operation feature should allow you to set a default number of labor hours per task so that it isn't required with each manufacturing order setup.

Vorteile

The ease of building products and variants. Our products have a lot of variants, and Katana makes it very easy to manage them all simultaneously. The previous MRP system used required us to build a unique BOM for every variant, which took significant time.

Nachteile

Minimum order quantity feature. Ability to reject/second quality part of a manufacturing lot. Develop an easy way to see product list not broken down into variants. Have the ability to only show certain BOM items on the shop floor app. Consumables like glue and tape don't need to be shown.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

Great user interface, very easily operable.

Nachteile

Pricing is getting worse. Basic functions disappear and appear later as a paid add on for hefty monthly fee.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

It answers my questions easily, what purchase orders do I need to make to satisfy the orders I have coming in. What should I work on next and when will it be ready for the customer! I can see delays in deliveries and the effect on production. It manages very complex bill of materials for our vast number of products. and it does so with a user experience that is simple and easy.

Nachteile

Where there has been anything I didn't like about the software, I chat instantly to the development team and they listen, they come back to me with an instant work around; then in the longer term they have provided updates that fix the problem. They are an adorable bunch of people and really want to make this work for our busy little workshop.

Vorteile

Integrates flawlessly with my Shopify store and makes managing materials and stock levels incredibly easy once everything is setup. The ability to prioritize jobs based on different criteria and rearrange them on the fly if necessary is critical for my business and Katana handles this with ease.

Nachteile

Setup was a chore BUT that is really more of a good thing, because there is a LOT of data that people might not take into account when initially considering software like this. If you want to use it properly, each and every little detail needs to be accounted for and when you have hundreds of SKUs like me, it can seem like a mountain. Climb it, you'll be glad you did.