Your ERP is authoritative on everything that was planned, and blind at the point of use. Arda does not replace it and is not trying to compete with it. Arda puts a scannable card on the shelf stock at one cell or one plant, so the reorder fires where the plan stops, and you expand to the next site once the first one has proven it.
Your first 10 cards are free. No hardware on your network, no rollout project, no change to your ERP.
Trusted by manufacturers including Rossmonster, Austere and Fat Fender.
Every material that goes into the product is planned, purchased and reported against. The sealant, the blades, the gloves, the filters and the packaging at the line are not, because they were never on a bill of materials for anything to plan them from. Arda is inventory replenishment software that makes the reorder signal physical at the point of use. The card on the shelf carries the quantity, sized to real burn rate and your supplier's lead time, so replenishment starts the moment stock runs low, on one cell, one plant, or every site you decide to put cards on.
The reorder fires from the shelf, by whoever emptied it, not from a transaction somebody posts later in a system they do not have open.
Card quantities come off real burn rate and supplier lead time, so the shelf covers the wait instead of a number somebody set at go-live and never revisited.
Scanning is the fastest way for an operator to get more of what they just used, so it survives the week the CI lead moves to the next project.
Your ERP is not wrong about the shelf. It was never asked about the shelf.
A large plant does not have an information problem about its build. It has a complete, accurate, auditable picture of every material that was planned into the product. The gap starts at the pallet edge, on the items nobody planned because nothing exists to plan them from, and it is the same gap at every site. It is worth what it is worth: Siemens puts an hour of unplanned downtime in a large automotive plant at $2.3 million.
Siemens, The True Cost of Downtime 2024
Corporate reporting is complete and accurate on everything that was planned, so a shortage at the line never surfaces as a system failure. It surfaces as somebody's bad morning, gets solved locally in twenty minutes, and is never visible above the plant. Nobody is being kept in the dark. The question was never asked.
One site runs a two-bin rack a supervisor built out of scrap. One runs a shared sheet that one buyer maintains. One has a stockroom attendant who is, personally, the system. All three work, none of them roll up, and each one leaves with the person who built it. Corporate cannot compare four sites because there is nothing comparable to look at.
The gap is real, so somebody scopes extending the ERP to the point of use, or a module, or a program with an integration attached. It gets costed. Then it goes into the same queue as the capacity work, and a consumables project does not beat a capacity project in any budget cycle that has ever happened. Two cycles later the line is still hunting for blades.
Arda's inventory replenishment software for large manufacturers puts a scannable card on the stock that sits where the work happens: the lineside racks, the cribs, the shadow boards, the supply cabinets. Whoever empties it scans it with the phone in their pocket, and the reorder fires at the agreed quantity to the supplier you already buy it from. Your ERP keeps planning, routing, costing and reporting exactly as it does today. Nothing about the corporate system changes, because nothing about the corporate system has to.
A plant does not need a rollout to find out whether cards hold. It needs one shelf, a fortnight, and a number it can hand the next plant manager. Each stage below is a decision by a real person, and none of them is a project.
The ten items that stop this line most often. Cards printed, on the shelf, scanning by the end of the week.
Every crib, lineside rack and supply cabinet in the building. Consumption history starts building per item.
The same card set, resized to the second plant's burn rate and its own suppliers.
ERP integration, custom workflows, lineside delivery, one agreement, one view across sites.
The corporate ERP is authoritative at every stage, including the last one. Nothing on this ladder moves a system of record.
Every item on the shelf gets a durable card with a QR code. An operator scans it with any phone when it runs low. No scanner gun to issue, no login to provision, no training day to schedule against the production plan.
The scan places the reorder at the sized quantity from the supplier you already buy it from. Nobody types a purchase order and nobody waits for a planning run to notice.
The plant manager sees the whole building. The CI lead sees which cards move and which never do. When there are four sites, that same view rolls up across all four.
Each card carries a loop the plant's own standard work already recognises: the reorder point, the two-bin system, the safety stock that covers the lead time, and a pull system that fires on consumption instead of on a forecast. The arithmetic lives on the shelf rather than in a plan-for-every-part spreadsheet that one person maintains.
Card ten items on a single cell this week and let the scans come in. No hardware on the network, no integration to build first, and nothing for corporate to approve before you can see whether it holds.
Two things kill a plant-floor tool. The floor stops using it in week three, or IT stops it before week one. Arda is shaped for both: scanning is the fastest route to more material, and there is nothing to install on your network for anyone to object to.
No hardware on a wall, no agent on a workstation, and no connection to a machine control, a historian or a line controller. A printed card on the shelf and a phone.
Arda runs the replenishment loop for the shelf. Jobs, routing, costing, financials and the material master do not move, and nothing has to be migrated for the first card to work.
Four hundred operators on a line costs the same as four, because the price is per card and never per seat. Nobody rations logins to hold the plant's software spend down.
The simplest way to get more of what you just used is to scan the card, so compliance holds after the CI lead's attention moves on. That is what separates a standard from a poster.
One building, one view, and a line that stops for reasons you can actually do something about.
Pull at the point of use, on the material class your value-stream map has always drawn as a cloud.
One supplier, one agreement, and a footprint small enough to review honestly.
These are independent shops, not multi-plant manufacturers, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. What they share with your site is the part that matters: they owned software, the software did not reach the shelf, and putting a card at the point of use closed the gap without anybody starting a project. Same card, smaller building.
Parts manufacturer and custom vehicle shop, after two failed ERP implementations. It is the most useful proof on this page for one reason: the objection your own team will raise is that the last rollout did not stick, and the card motion held exactly where heavier software had not.
Read the Fat Fender case study →Heavy-industry fabricator of custom trucks and metalwork. A manager used to walk the floor every week to work out what needed reordering. Project manager Anthony Olivas: “I just take 10 minutes at the end of the day to go around the shop, collect the cards, and now I know exactly what needs to be ordered. It used to take two or three hours a week.”
Read the Assembly Industrial case study →Overland vehicle builder. Cards went on 100% of the supplies they stock inside a year, one shelf at a time, with no implementation project. That is the expansion pattern this page is describing, run to completion at one site.
Read the Rossmonster case study →Nobody at a large manufacturer is choosing between Arda and their ERP, and this page would be useless if it pretended they were. The real choice is between funding a project to extend the system you have, bringing in a supplier-run program, and putting a card on the shelf this week.
| Arda | Extending the ERP to the point of use | A supplier-run vending or bin program | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What fires the reorder | A scan on the card at the shelf, by whoever emptied it | A transaction someone posts, then a planning run | The supplier's round, or a dispensing event at a machine |
| Who approves the first site | The plant. Nothing goes on the network | A funded project, plus IT and the system owner | Procurement, an agreement, and usually a site-volume floor |
| Time to the first live shelf | An afternoon | A budget cycle | Weeks, plus hardware to install |
| What it reaches | Everything you stock at the point of use, on-BOM and off | Whatever gets configured, which starts from the planned material it already holds | The lines the program covers, at the sites that justify a stop |
| Adding the second plant | Card it. There is nothing to implement again | Phase two | A new site agreement |
| Effect on the corporate ERP | None. It stays authoritative and unchanged | It is the ERP, and it is the right answer for planned material | None, though the consumption history sits with the supplier |
| Cost to start | $0 for your first 10 cards | Project budget | Bundled into unit price |
Weighing named tools rather than whole approaches? The Arda Comparison Hub has side-by-side breakdowns.
No implementation project. Card ten items and the loop is running.
Free plan, no card required to try it. Paid plans add a 7-day trial.
Splices in alongside NetSuite, QuickBooks, Odoo, Xero and more, and only when you want it to.
Every operator on the line can scan without changing what the plant pays.
Pick the line that stops most often and card the ten items that stop it. No hardware on your network, no integration to build first, and no change to the system your company runs on. Prove it on one cell, then hand the next plant the numbers.
Free plan, unlimited users, no rollout project.
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