A 1/2-13 x 2 Grade 5 zinc and a 1/2-20 x 2 Grade 8 zinc are one character apart in a part number and indistinguishable at four feet. Arda puts a scannable card on every bin you service, and the card is the part rather than a description of it. Scan it and the order fires at the quantity already set for that part at that site. No sensor bins, no hardware to install, priced per card.
Your first 10 cards are free. Runs under the bin program you already have, on any phone.
Trusted by manufacturers including Rossmonster, Austere, and Fat Fender.
A stockout is a reorder that fired too late, or never fired at all. Count-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 bin of hex cap screws, a shelf of structural bolts, or a drawer of blind rivets.
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 the real burn rate and lead time at that site, so the second bin always covers the wait.
When a customer's build rate changes what they pull, you resize the card once. Nobody recalculates a min/max by hand.
Forty bins can look the same. Forty cards cannot.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
A manufacturing buyer describing the bin program their supplier runs for them. r/procurement, 2024-02-20
That is your customer talking about a program like yours. Digitizing the signal is the part they are asking for.
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, priced per card rather than per site.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 bin you service. Nobody tallies stock or runs a cycle count 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 route on day one.
No scanner gun, no new login, no training day. A rep scans with the phone already in their pocket, so nothing new stands between them and the order.
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.
The route stops being a judgment call. Scan the card on the bin, and the right part at the right quantity is already moving before you reach the next aisle.
Replenishment arrives as a consumption event per bin per site instead of a rep's handwriting keyed in at the end of the day.
Card a site for the price of its bins. Accounts that never justified a service route can go under program, and the program grows without growing the service headcount.
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.
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 →
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 →Custom vehicle manufacturer. Holdings on critical components went from 25+ down to 5 inside a year while output went up 6×. 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 →For the items that actually stop a job, here is how the three common approaches stack up on the floor.
| Arda | ERP / MRP | Spreadsheet / memory | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Signal to reorder | Scan a card, order fires automatically | Manual entry, then a planning run | Someone remembers to look |
| Covers every stocked item | Yes, on-BOM and off, same card | On-BOM only, misses the rest | Only if updated by hand |
| Shop-floor compliance | High, scanning is the easy path | Low, floor skips data entry | Low, depends on one person |
| Setup time | Start with one part in a day | Months of implementation | Fast, but breaks as it grows |
| Works with your existing ERP | Yes, splices in, no rip and replace | It is the ERP | Disconnected from it |
| Cost to get started | $0 for your first 10 cards | High license and rollout cost | Free, until a stockout costs a day |
Weighing specific tools rather than whole approaches? The Arda Comparison Hub has side-by-side breakdowns against eTurns, Fishbowl, Katana, Cin7, Odoo, Sortly, and more.
No implementation project. Card a single bin 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 your reps and your customers can scan from day one.
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 your first ten are free, so the whole test costs a print run.
Free plan, unlimited users, no hardware to install.
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