Katana
Key Info:
Katana is a cloud inventory and manufacturing platform for product businesses that make, buy and sell physical goods. It links raw materials, finished products, production orders, purchasing, sales demand and warehouse activity so teams can see availability and production priorities in one operational view.
Details
Inventory visibility
Katana shows stock, committed quantities and expected supply for materials and products. Location-aware inventory and warehouse activity support receiving, transfers, picking and packing, while batch tracking can preserve production context. Evaluation should compare the calculated availability with real stock and test a transfer, damaged item, partial receipt, return and oversold sales channel to understand how exceptions affect the plan.
Manufacturing planning
Bills of materials, production orders and shop-floor tasks connect demand to required ingredients or components. Teams can monitor production status, material availability and deadlines and record completed work. Buyers should model a representative multi-level product and include yield loss, substitutions, rework and outsourced steps. Confirm how costs, work-in-progress and completed goods are represented before relying on margin reports.
Purchasing and order flow
Purchasing tools help create and track purchase orders based on operational need. Sales orders from connected channels reserve inventory and inform production priorities, while integrations connect accounting, ecommerce, shipping and automation services. A proof should establish which system owns products and orders, then test cancellations, duplicates, refunds, late supplier deliveries and recovery from a connector outage.
Fit and evaluation
Katana may suit small and midsize manufacturers, assemblers and product brands seeking cloud inventory with production control without implementing a broad enterprise ERP. Selection should verify locations, users, order volumes, manufacturing depth, quality requirements, traceability, permissions, API access, accounting treatment, reporting, onboarding and plan limits. Use real production and fulfilment scenarios to determine whether operational simplicity is preserved as complexity grows.
Decision record
Record the tested stock model, location structure, exception scenarios, required edition, verified integrations, data ownership, migration assumptions and named operational owner. Define opening-balance approval, cutover reconciliation, user training, support escalation and the measures that will determine whether the rollout is successful. Include a rollback threshold and a dated review of data quality after the first operating cycle. Keep unsupported pricing, customer-size, language and device values blank until a current official source maps them exactly to a BBS field.