P/N
Minimum
Location
Order
Supplier
For fastener distributors
Your customers count on the right fastener being there. Give every stocked part an Arda card with the quantity set for that customer. One scan starts the reorder, with the part and quantity already attached.
P/N
80%
less stock held
5×
production
Holdings on critical components went from 25+ down to 5, and cards went on 100% of supplies inside a year. The shelf got leaner. The order book did not.
Rossmonster, custom vehicle manufacturer
The reorder stops depending on a rep's eyes
Somebody pulls the last handful of 3/8-16 out of the bin and nobody on your route hears about it. Every stockout starts there. Arda puts the reorder on the bin instead: the card carries that exact part number, the quantity agreed for that site, and your lead time. The scan an assembler makes when the bin runs low is the same motion that orders the refill, on the days your rep is on site and the days nobody is. The second bin covers the wait. Same card on structural bolts, blind rivets and concrete anchors.
Forty bins can look the same. Forty cards cannot.
Every way a fastener program breaks ends on your customer's line
Fasteners are the deepest catalog in industrial distribution and the shallowest thing to inspect. Field Fastener publishes sourcing more than 120,000 unique SKUs across more than 175 VMI programs. The dimensions that separate those SKUs, one thread pitch, one grade, one plating, are the ones a person cannot resolve across a stockroom. And on a class C item the indirect cost of handling runs to roughly 80 percent of total cost, per Component Solutions Group, so the expensive part of a wrong bin was never the piece price.
The wrong grade goes back in the bin
A rep tops off a bin from a bulk box on the truck. Right diameter, right length, right zinc, and Grade 5 where the print calls for Grade 8. The only tell is three radial marks on the head instead of six. It holds under static load for weeks, and then it does not, or your customer's quality group finds it first and quarantines the bin.
The label outlives the part
Bins move during a cell rearrangement, or engineering changes a print from coarse to fine and the shelf never hears about it. The label still reads 3/8-16 and the bin now holds 3/8-24. Every min and max on the sheet is still attached to a part that left that location, so the program replenishes accurately to the wrong item. That is worse than not replenishing at all, because everyone downstream trusts it.
A 400-bin route comes down to one rep's eyes
The rep walks the wall judging fill levels on bins whose contents differ only by pitch, grade or finish, then keys the order from that judgment. Read a half-full bin of #10-32 as the #10-24 beside it and the shortage surfaces two weeks later as a stopped line on your customer's floor. They do not blame the bin. They blame the supplier who owns the program.
"That list includes their vendor specific SKUs but no manufacturer info... we don't have the visibility to intervene... At the very least, their system should be digitized, for their sake and ours."
That is your customer talking about a program like yours. Digitizing the signal is the part they are asking for.
How does inventory replenishment work in a fastener bin program using Arda?
This is the fastener cut of Arda's inventory replenishment software, applied to bins sitting on somebody else's floor. Every bin you service gets a durable card, and the card encodes the exact part, diameter, pitch, length, grade and finish, along with the quantity already agreed for that part at that site. A scan fires the replenishment order. Nobody keys a PO, nobody reads a part number off a strip of tape, and nothing about your bins, your routes or your min and max levels has to change. It is program-grade execution without a hardware estate: a printed card and any phone, with nothing to license per site.
One fastener family, forty live SKUs, and nothing you can see from four feet
The difference between two of these bins is often one character in a part number and nothing a person can resolve across a stockroom. That is why the card carries the part and the scan carries the order. Every family below is one chip because the trade calls it one thing, and every one of them multiplies into hundreds of live SKUs on the dimensions listed with it. Carrying abrasives, safety, jan-san and cutting tools alongside the fastener wall? That is a breadth problem rather than a depth one, and it is answered on the page for industrial and MRO distributors.
- Hex cap screws & hex bolts
- Socket head cap screws
- Structural bolts
- Nuts
- Washers
- Machine screws
- Self-drilling & sheet metal screws
- Wood, deck & lag screws
- Blind rivets & rivet nuts
- Concrete & masonry anchors
- Threaded inserts
- Pins, rings, rod & studs
Scan the card on the bin
Every bin in the program gets a durable card with a QR code, carrying the exact part rather than a description of it. Your rep scans it on the route, or your customer's assembler scans it between visits. Any phone, no scanner gun, no login friction.
The order fires automatically
The scan resolves to that part number at that site and places the replenishment order at the agreed quantity. No keyed PO, no order written from a wall of near-identical bins.
See every bin, pulled to restocked
Pulled, on order, restocked, per bin and per site, across every account under program. That status history is also the consumption record.
Each card encodes a proven loop sized to real consumption: reorder point, the two-bin system, min/max levels, and safety stock. The math lives on the bin, not in a rep's head.
Hex cap screw 1/2-13 x 2, Grade 5 zinc
Reorder qty
500 units
Lead time
3 days
Supplier
Midwest Fastener Supply
Safety stock
150 units
Scanned 07:52
PO sent 07:52
Restocked
Start with the one bin that caused your last emergency rush
Card it today, scan it tomorrow, and see the order fire without a rep reading a wall. Expand across the shelf when it has proven itself.
Make Free Kanban CardsFree plan, no credit card
The same loop, seen from the customer's side of the shelf
None of these companies is a distributor. They are manufacturers running the card loop on their own stock, which is the same shelf and the same loop your program manages, seen from the other side. We show them because the outcome a bin program is sold on gets measured at the point of use, and that is where these numbers come from.
2x
throughput
10 min
a day ordering, from 2–3 hours a week
Assembly Industrial
Custom truck and metalwork fabricator. Was losing days to a single missing component, which is the line stop that ends a bin program. Going from four builds at a time to eight took no more shop and no more people, and the ordering itself went from a job to a scan.
Read the Assembly Industrial case study →0
stockouts
5x
high-value builds
Fat Fender
Manufacturer and supplier of parts, after two failed ERP implementations. Cards worked where two rollouts did not, which is the answer to the question every program manager asks first: is this another implementation.
Read the Fat Fender case study →80%
less stock held
100%
of supplies carded
Rossmonster
Custom vehicle manufacturer. Holdings on critical components went from 25+ down to 5 inside a year, a fifth of what it held, while production went up five times. That is the depth-of-coverage result a program is sold on, across a lot of small parts rather than one dramatic item.
Read the Rossmonster case study →Arda vs ERP vs spreadsheets for fastener bin stock
For the bins that actually stop your customer's line, here is how the three common approaches stack up on a route.
AspectArdaERP / MRPSpreadsheet / memory
Signal to reorderScan a card, order fires automaticallyManual entry, then a planning runSomeone remembers to look
Covers every stocked itemYes, on-BOM and off, same cardOn-BOM only, misses the restOnly if updated by hand
Shop-floor complianceHigh, scanning is the easy pathLow, floor skips data entryLow, depends on one person
Setup timeStart with one part in a dayMonths of implementationFast, but breaks as it grows
Works with your existing ERPYes, splices in, no rip and replaceIt is the ERPDisconnected from it
Cost to get started$0 on the free planHigh license and rollout costFree, until a stockout costs a day
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from the bin stock program we already run on spreadsheets?
The program stays the same. The bins, the routes, the customers and the min and max levels you already set do not change. What changes is where the replenishment signal comes from. Instead of a rep reading fill levels and keying an order, a scan on the bin card fires the order at the quantity already set for that part at that site. The judgment call comes out of the loop, and the sheet stops being the system of record.
Can our customers scan the cards themselves, or does it have to be our rep?
Either, and both on the same program. Scanning is free, unlimited and needs no account on every Arda plan, so a customer's assembler and your rep can scan the same bin without anyone taking a seat. Many distributors card a site so the customer scans between service visits and the rep's route becomes a check rather than a survey.
What stops the wrong part going into the right bin when forty SKUs look the same?
The card carries the part identity, including diameter, pitch, length, grade and finish, so the item on the card is unambiguous even when the parts are not. The scan resolves to that exact part number rather than to a description someone reads off a bin edge. Relabelling a bin means reprinting a card, which is a deliberate act, rather than a strip of tape that quietly stops matching what is inside.
Does this work for consignment, or only for stock the customer owns?
Both, and the distinction is commercial rather than technical. Vendor managed inventory decides who owns the replenishment decision. Consignment decides who holds title to the stock and when the money moves. Arda sits under either arrangement as the execution layer: card status runs pulled, on order, restocked, per bin and per site, which is the consumption record a consignment or pay-on-use arrangement bills against. Ownership stays a question between you and your customer. Arda supplies the signal and the record underneath it.
Does Arda work alongside my ERP?
Yes. Arda runs the replenishment loop for everything you stock and slots in where ERP and MRP fall hardest, on the variable-consumption goods that never make it onto a BOM. Your ERP keeps doing jobs, routing, and costing. It integrates with QuickBooks, NetSuite, Odoo, Xero, Shopify, Stripe, Airtable, Make, and Zapier, plus a REST API, so there is no rip and replace.
How much does Arda cost, and is there a free trial?
Create unlimited items and cards on Free, without Order Queue access. Solo includes one user and up to 10 orders a month after its 7-day trial. Team and Pro are priced per Power User and include unlimited scanning for your team. Compare current plans and billing.
Ten cards, one bin row, one account
Pick the bin row that generated your last emergency rush and card it. Scan it tomorrow and see the order fire without a rep reading a wall. A 50-bin site is 50 cards, and cards are unlimited on every plan, so the whole test costs a print run.
Free plan, unlimited cards, no hardware to install.