Katana Manufacturing ERP Reviews

Improved our ability to track shared ingredients for the products we sell.
Easy to know what quantity of ingredients to buy and who to buy it from.
Connects to Shopify and updates automatically.
Amazing customer support.

It took some time to learn the software and create ingredients for each product - but is worth while.

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.

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.

Ease of use, easy to implement and overall ease of use

Shortcomings, bugs, and ever-changing pricing models

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.

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

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

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.

It is intuitive and easy to implement. I like that you can prioritize builds so if we are short on product I can customize which particular build for it to go to.

I wish we could add materials to sales orders. Sometimes we sell different parts and it would be nice to add those to a sales order.

Katana integrates with my Shopify Site very easily and makes bundling products on my Shopify so much easier to track.

We also make candles and kits in house. Katana makes tracking inventory so much easier allowing me to know without guess or counting my materials how much of any particular object I can produce at any given time.

It would be nice if there were barcodes, but I hear feature is coming soon. It would also be nice if I sell out of an object that is apart of a bundle that it would then make the bundle unavailable on my shopify site. I believe this is also in the works.

I love this software because of the ease of use and the workflow methodology. The drill down ability for stock and manufactured items are great. We have managed to get a lot more information on staff productivity through exporting complete manufacture orders data and reporting. I also love it that support is real and that I now know some of the team personally. They answer queries fast and efficiently.

All the current issues I have are in development.
For example:
1. Adding landing costs to purchase order items
2. Multi Currency
3. Back Order information

The support is always helpful - they've been quick to answer and they have always been able to answer our questions.

We've had this app for about 2 months now, and we are loving it. The adjustment was fairly simple and easy for staff, importing our data was easy and straight forward for setup.

Would be great if we could count inventory via barcode scanner instead of manually entering qty's and then importing.

Brilliant. Katana has transformed how we managed stock and control manufacturing. The best part is it is simple without unwanted extras that take as much time to maintain as a manual system. Katana is efficient and fast. Integrates well with Xero and Shopify. Highly recommended.

AMobile App would be brilliant but not essential

+ Simplicity. Probably most intuitive specialized software I've used.
+ Price structure. Very affordable for us.
+ Customer support.

- Lack of some "nice to have features". But, it's another side of simplicity and affordability, right?

- User interface
- Ease of use
- Set up was straight forward

- Lacking a few features but they are expanding and often adding new features

That may not sound very exciting, but in my experience, it's not always a given that getting the features to work is straightforward. But Katana really is both powerful and yet pretty straightforward, although just BECAUSE it has a lot of facility, I would recommend the investment of a little time in watching some of the training videos, which are excellent. Once I'd done that, it was full steam ahead and everything fell beautifully into place. The integration with Xero was completely straightforward and works like a charm. I know that as we go forward and get more and more information into the system it will provide even more, very valuable information for us.

I have only a couple of really minor niggles; I would prefer to be able to enter dates, rather than having to always pick them off a calendar (for someone who types fast, this slows me down). I'd also like it if when you are "making" a product, if all the components of that product's sub-assembly are available, the software would just go on down the line and automatically make right down to the lowest assembly level. But as I said, these are really minor and would not stop me from wholeheartedly recommending Katana.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Clean interface, well organized and thought out and modern in its features. Integrates well with lots of other software I use, including Quickbooks and Shopify. Customer service is absolutely top notch, and the tutorials are very helpful.

If you have zero experience with MRPs like I did, it may take you a little while to figure everything out. But the customer service team really goes above and beyond to answer any questions and walk you through anything you're having issues with. If there was one feature I wish was available that is not currently, it's barcode scanner integration. That would make updating my inventory and adding new knives to inventory much easier.

PROS:

- really easy to use, great interface

- support is responsive, although we didn't have much need for support thanks to a very thorough and detailed knowledge base

- reasonably priced compared to other inventory management systems

- good integrations with Shopify, Quickbooks, etc

- it made inventory tracking a lot easier for us as a manufacturer. The manhours saved on doing Excel updates to inventory would definitely cost more if you run complex operations

CONS:

- Integration with Quickbooks is a little iffy if you don't login to Quickbooks beforehand

- It doesn't have a multicurrency feature for purchase orders (when you buy inventory in a currency different from your main currency)

- It's not easy to account for freight costs in the costs of buying raw materials

- You can't work in 2 browser tabs without paying for 2 users, this can be a little frustrating

Helps keep track of work stock if used correctly.

Updated regulary. We had an issue where there was not enough decimal places for us to input our formulas, we raised this issue and within a month it was fixed.

Allows me to quickly find out a customers purchasing history and the percentage profit made per product

My only issue is that it is slightly expensive for a small company.

This makes our manufacturing process so easy, our orders come in via shopify and go straight into Katana. The time it saves us is amazing.

We would still like to be able to add images to products, this was something we asked for in the early days and were assured it would happen, but not happened to date.

I was looking for software that could manage both my purchased and manufactured products with both BOM and raw material management. Katana does a great job of this with the bonus of syncing with Xero and Shopify. It is not a complex system and simple for my small business.

Katana is quite basic with what you can record for your products and materials. It would be great if there was more ability to add custom fields ( supplier SKUs, Drawing number references etc). Also some ability to customize purchase order and sales order format would be a good improvement. To be able to add a suppliers sku to a PO would be very valuable.

The dashboard is simple to understand and use. It makes purchases, sells, orders so much easier to manage. The team behind Katana is exceptional. They are quick to answer and always ready to help. Integration from shopify was easy.

The length of time it took to setup in the beginning because the app was lacking a unit conversion which they have since fixed.

I appreciate how much this software has helped me fix my inventory issues! I also love that when I have an issue that I do not know how to resolve, I can schedule a call and get live support. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] is awesome and extremely relatable!

I think there could be a little more development with the integration process. It would also be nice to have an onboarding specialist because it is difficult to explain the unique quirks of your business and specific issues you need help with, to a different person each time. I also think the shop floor app could use a little more functionality but I am hopeful they will be adding more features eventually.

The fact that Katana is always available and so easy to navigate with saves time.
Our requests for new features like back order handling, serial number tracking and multi currency and warehousing some of them already implemented and some coming soon.
The fact that we response fairly quickly on questions that we have submitted.

It was probably moving over from a well known package like Pastel Evolution to something not familiar to me; but the transition was seamless.

Ease of use
Set up
Customer service
Ability to integrate

No in house integrations option. Customer service was so good, I would have liked an integration option directly from Katana

Katana keeps us organized both in inventory and in our manufacturing process.

Many new features seem to be only available in the highest level of the software, which is very expensive for a small business.