Most replenishment software waits for someone to enter a number. Arda puts a scannable card on every item you stock, consumable or not, so the scan fires the reorder and the shelf refills before anyone notices it was low. It runs alongside your ERP, not instead of it.
Your first 10 cards are free. Works alongside your ERP, no rip and replace.
Trusted by manufacturers including Rossmonster, Austere, and Fat Fender.
A stockout is a reorder that fired too late, or never fired at all. Number-based systems leave that trigger to a person, and people are busy. Arda makes the trigger physical: the card on the bin is the reorder, sized to your supplier's lead time, so replenishment starts the moment stock runs low and the shelf refills before the second bin runs dry. That works the same on a box of consumables, a rack of raw material, or a bin of purchased components.
Scanning the empty bin is the fastest way to get more, so the reorder fires on its own, every time.
Reorder point and safety stock are set to your real burn rate and lead time, so the second bin always covers the wait.
When a job changes what you burn, you resize the card once. Nobody recalculates a min/max by hand.
A stockout is a signal that never fired. Arda makes the signal impossible to miss.
Every replenishment system is a rule about when to reorder, and the rules are mostly sound. What breaks is the thing that fires them. Three failures show up in every shop, distributor and plant we have put cards into, and none of them are arithmetic problems.
Reorder point, min/max and par level all measure against an on-hand figure. That figure is only as good as the last person who updated it, and on a busy floor nobody does. The plan is fine. The input is not.
Replenishment tools built for retail forecast next month from last month. A shop that quotes a different job every week has no last month to forecast from, so the safety stock is either dead money or gone by Tuesday.
Nothing on a bill of materials is orphaned, because the BOM assigns it. Everything else belongs to whoever last noticed it was low, which is a different person on every shelf and nobody at all on the shelves people walk past. The gap is not that no system is watching. It is that no one was ever given the job.
Arda's inventory replenishment software puts a scannable card on every item you stock, starting with the off-BOM consumables no system owns, so the scan fires the reorder on its own. No stock-taking, no purchase order to type, no ERP rollout. Scan a card, the material shows up.
Consumables are where the pain is loudest, because they never make it onto a BOM, so nothing is watching them. The same card works on anything you stock, on-BOM or off. Put a card on it and the shortage disappears.
Every stocked item gets a durable card with a QR code, from a drawer of consumables to a bin of fasteners to a rack of raw material. An operator scans it with any phone, no extra hardware, no login friction.
The scan hits Arda's backend, which places the reorder at the right quantity from the right supplier. No purchase order to type.
Purchasing and the owner watch which cards are pulled, on order, or restocked across parts and locations, without walking the floor.
Each card encodes a proven loop sized to your real consumption: reorder point, the two-bin system, min/max levels, and safety stock. The math lives on the card, not in someone's head.
Card it today, scan it tomorrow, and see the reorder fire on its own. Expand across the shelf when it has proven itself.
Every replenishment system is a rule about when to reorder. The rules differ in one place: what fires the trigger. That is the whole difference between them.
| Method | What fires the reorder | Holds when | Breaks when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reorder point | An on-hand figure crosses a calculated threshold. Reorder point equals average daily use times lead time, plus safety stock. | Consumption is steady and the on-hand figure is trustworthy. | Nobody updates that figure between jobs, so the threshold is measured against a number that is already wrong. |
| Min/max | Stock falls to the minimum, you order back up to the maximum. Physically this is the two-bin system with the numbers written down instead of shelved. | You want one simple band per item and the band gets revisited. | The min and the max are set once at go-live and never resized as demand shifts. |
| Par level | A fixed round tops every item back up to a set level, whether it needs it or not. The lean version of the same idea is every part every interval. | A route already exists: a van, a rep's circuit, a weekly stockroom walk. | Consumption spikes between rounds, so the item is gone on day two of a seven-day cycle. |
| Two-bin / kanban | A bin empties and its kanban card gets scanned. The card carries the quantity, so the reorder point is physical instead of calculated. This is a pull system. | High-mix work, unforecastable consumption, and a floor that will not do data entry. | Card quantities are never resized after the work changes. |
| Vendor managed inventory | The supplier owns the replenishment decision and restocks your bins on their round. VMI is about who decides; consignment is a separate question about who owns the stock and when the money moves. | A distributor already services your site and you would rather not own the ordering. | The rep visits on a calendar rather than on consumption, so the round and the burn drift apart. |
The first three methods all depend on a number being right. The last two depend on a signal being seen. That is why pull-based replenishment holds on a shop floor where push-based planning does not, and it is why Arda encodes the reorder point on the card rather than in a field. Set the card quantity once against real burn rate and lead time, and the kanban loop runs without anyone recalculating it. Weighing a supplier-managed program against running your own cards? Read vendor managed inventory vs kanban.
Count-everything tools fail because they add a task. Arda removes one. That is what holds compliance past week one.
The card is the replenishment signal, on every item you stock. Nobody tallies the shelf and nobody does a stock check to make the numbers real.
The simplest way to do the job is to scan the card, so compliance sticks where badge-in ERP screens lose the floor on day one.
No scanner gun, no new login, no training day. An operator scans with the phone already in their pocket, so nothing new stands between them and the reorder.
Reorder point, min/max, and safety stock are baked into the card at the point of use, not buried in a back-office sheet that drifts the moment demand shifts.
One scan when a bin runs low, and the refill is already moving. Same motion for every item on the floor. Nothing to learn.
Orders fire at the right quantity with no stack of manual POs, and every card's status sits in one view: pulled, on order, restocked.
Reordering stops eating the hours you would rather spend quoting, and you get real consumption data across the whole shelf instead of gut feel.
Four shops, four different trades, one mechanic. Each of them put cards on what they stock, from off-BOM consumables to raw material to finished components, and got their throughput, and their hours, back.
Overland vehicle builder. Cards went on 100% of supplies inside a year, and holdings on critical components fell from 25+ to 5 while output went up 6×.
Read the Rossmonster case study →Precision machine shop. Same building, same crew, same machines. Reordering moved onto cards and the shop tripled what it could push through the door.
Read the Austere case study →
Parts manufacturer and custom vehicle shop, after two failed ERP implementations. Eliminated stockouts across the parts they stock and cut the order backlog from 365+ days to 20.
Read the Fat Fender case study →Heavy-industry fabricator of custom trucks and metalwork. Weekly stockouts gone, and the floor went from four builds at a time to eight in six months, without a bigger shop or a bigger team.
Read the Assembly Industrial case study →The mechanic is the same everywhere: a card on the bin, a scan when it runs low. What changes is which items stop your jobs. Pick your trade and see the ones that stop yours.
Stocking your customers' bins rather than your own, or working under a lot-controlled quality system? The card is the same, the constraints are not.
Ten tools, and the only three questions that separate them: what fires the reorder, what it costs to put the whole floor on it, and whether it expects to be your system of record. Every verdict below is a real verdict, including the ones that point you somewhere other than here.
| Software | Best for | Reorder signal | Pricing model | Starting price | Runs alongside an ERP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arda | SMB and high-mix manufacturers replenishing every item they stock, on-BOM and off | Scan a card on the bin, the order fires | Per card, unlimited users | $0 for 10 cards | Yes, splices in |
| eTurns TrackStock | Distributors running VMI in their customers' stockrooms | Scan or scale sensor at point of use | Per stockroom or vehicle, unlimited users | $40/mo per stockroom | Yes |
| Katana | SMB manufacturers who need production scheduling and MRP in one place | MRP run against a bill of materials | Flat, plus add-on modules | $299/mo | Partial, it is an ERP-lite MRP |
| Fishbowl | SMB manufacturers and wholesalers running on QuickBooks | Manual entry, then a reorder-point alert | Priced by number of users | $229/mo for 2 users | QuickBooks-adjacent |
| inFlow | Small product businesses managing orders and stock together | Manual entry, then a reorder-point alert | Seat-capped tiers plus per-user overage | $129/mo for 2 members | No |
| Zoho Inventory | Very small multichannel sellers | Reorder-point alert on entered quantities | Per organization, with order and user caps | $29/mo | No |
| Sortly | Very small teams cataloguing assets and supplies rather than replenishing them | Manual entry in the app | Seat-capped tiers | $24/mo for 2 users | No |
| Netstock | Distributors and manufacturers already on an ERP who want forecast-driven ordering | Statistical forecast plus reorder point | Flat subscription, unlimited users | From $900/mo | Yes, and it requires one |
| Slimstock (Slim4) | Complex multi-echelon retail and wholesale networks | Demand forecast across the network | Enterprise quote | Not published | Yes, integrates rather than replaces |
| NetSuite | Mid-market and enterprise companies replacing their whole system of record | Planning run against entered transactions | Platform fee plus per named user | $999/mo base plus $129/user | It is the ERP |
Most replenishment software is priced per seat and triggered by a number somebody typed. Arda is priced per card with unlimited users, and triggered by a scan on the shelf.
Pricing verified July 2026.
Weighing specific tools rather than whole approaches? The Arda Comparison Hub has side-by-side breakdowns against eTurns, Fishbowl, Katana, Cin7, Fastenal, Odoo, Sortly, and more.
No implementation project. Card a single item and the loop is running.
Free plan, no card required to try it. Paid plans add a 7-day trial.
Splices in alongside QuickBooks, NetSuite, Odoo, Xero and more. No rip and replace.
Priced per card, not per seat, so the whole floor can scan from day one.
Put a card on the one item that stalled your last job and watch the reorder fire without anyone asking for it. The first ten cards are free, the whole floor can scan them, and your ERP does not have to move.
Free plan, unlimited users, no ERP rollout.
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