Cutting, bending, welding and finishing each burn a different shelf, and only one of those shelves is on the bill of materials. Arda puts a scannable card on every item you stock, on-BOM or off, so the scan is the reorder and the next cell is loaded before the job releases.
Your first 10 cards are free. Works alongside your ERP, no rip and replace.
Trusted by manufacturers including Assembly Industrial, Rossmonster, and Fat Fender.
A stockout is a reorder that fired too late, or never fired at all. In a fab shop the trigger usually belongs to whoever happens to open the cabinet, and that person is mid-weldment. Arda makes the trigger physical: the card on the bin is the reorder, sized to your supplier's real delivery days, so replenishment starts the moment the shelf runs low. That works the same on a case of flap discs, a rack of tube, or a drum of wire.
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.
Four processes. Four shelves. One of them is enough to hold the truck.
Sixty powder-coated frames, due Friday, for a customer whose install crew was already booked. Tube landed Monday, the laser nested Tuesday, the brake ran Wednesday, and by Thursday morning the weld cell had thirty frames tacked. Then the second welder burned the last spool of wire and there was nothing behind it. The supply rep runs Tuesdays and Fridays. Three welders moved to filler work, the powder coat booth gave its slot away until Tuesday, and a $48,000 job slipped a week. The shop then paid freight to expedite a $120 spool. The job was never short of steel. It was short of the one item nothing was watching.
Cutting, bending, welding and finishing each burn a different consumable family, and each one has a different person who usually reorders it. You can be fully stocked on three of the four and still not put the job on the truck.
A spattered laser cover slide, a worn plasma electrode, a dull bandsaw blade. Parts get scrapped before anyone calls it a shortage, because those spares live in a drawer that only ever empties and no purchase order was attached to it.
Powder in the shop's standard colour, masking tape, silicone plugs, hooks, blast media. The weldment is done, the truck is booked, and the booth cannot run. Everything upstream can be resequenced. This cannot.
Arda's inventory replenishment software for metal fabrication shops puts a scannable card on every item you stock, starting with the shelves your ERP has never had a line for. The scan is the reorder: no purchase order to type, no ERP rollout, nothing to tally at the end of the week. It is the same inventory replenishment software Arda runs for every trade, pointed at the four processes a fab shop runs under one roof. Scan a card, the material shows up.
Consumables are where the pain is loudest, because a BOM lists the tube and the plate and never the wire, the gas, the discs, or the nozzles that turn one into the other. But the same card works on anything you stock, on-BOM or off.
Every stocked item gets a durable card with a QR code, from a case of flap discs to a rack of tube to a drum of wire. A fabricator 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 without anyone counting. Expand across all four shelves 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 item you stock. 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 floor on day one.
No scanner gun, no new login, no training day. A fabricator 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. No software to learn.
Orders fire at the right quantity with no stack of manual POs, and every card's status is in one place.
Hands off reordering for good and gets the hours back for quoting, with real consumption data across the whole shelf instead of gut feel.
High-mix shops that cut, form, weld and finish under one roof, and put a card on every shelf that feeds those four processes, not just the ones the ERP already plans.
Custom vehicle and metal shop that had already failed two ERP implementations. Stockouts eliminated across the parts they stock, and an order backlog of 365+ days pulled down to 20.
Read the Fat Fender case study →Overland vehicle builder with its own cut, weld and finish shop. 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 feeding the same weldments a fab shop assembles. Doubled revenue and tripled throughput inside the same building, with reordering handed to the cards.
Read the Austere case study →For the items that actually hold a truck, 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, from the tube rack to the powder shelf | 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, 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.
Assembly Industrial cuts, forms, welds and finishes under one roof, and it went from weekly stockouts to none while doubling what the floor could build. Start with the shelf that stopped your last job, on us, and let it reorder itself.
Free plan, unlimited users, no ERP rollout.
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