You outgrew the spreadsheet years ago and bought a real system. It runs your jobs, your routing and your costing, and it earns its keep every day. The shelf is the one place it never got fed, so the on-hand figures for anything consumable are a guess with a decimal point. Arda puts a scannable card on those items, so a scan fires the reorder and nobody has to be right about a number.
Your first 10 cards are free. Starts on one line, and your ERP does not move.
Trusted by manufacturers including Assembly Industrial, Rossmonster, and Fat Fender.
A stockout is a reorder that fired too late, or never fired at all. Every system you already own leaves that trigger to a person, and at your size that person is now covering two lines and a second building. 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. The same card works on an off-BOM consumable, a rack of raw material, or a purchased component, and it works the same on line one and line six.
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.
A second line gets its own bins and its own cards, so its consumption fires its own orders. Nothing about line one has to be re-tuned to make room for it.
"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."Anthony Olivas, Assembly Industrial
Nothing here is an argument against your ERP. It plans jobs, it routes work, it costs a quote, and at 150 people you cannot run without it. But somewhere in the implementation, inventory was phase two, and phase two is where most of these projects quietly end. So the modules you use are excellent and the ones you do not are still on the invoice, and the shelf sits in the gap between them.
Jobs, routing and costing went live because they had a deadline and an owner. The inventory module was scoped, demoed, half configured, and then the go-live shipped without it. Nobody decided to skip it. It just never got its own week, and two years later the screen still shows the opening balance somebody keyed in during data migration. This is the normal outcome, not the embarrassing one: more than half of the companies in Panorama's 2026 ERP survey improved only their key processes, and the median project already ran nine months.
At forty people one person held the shelf and one sheet backed them up. At a hundred and fifty there are three sheets, three owners and three versions, and none of them are wrong from where their owner sits. The receiving sheet, the buyer's sheet and the line lead's sheet each describe a different building. Half-adopting a system did not solve half the problem, it added reconciling to a job nobody had before. And that meeting is quarterly, so the answer is never current.
The person who reaches into the empty bin is no longer the person who can place the order. It goes operator to lead, lead to supervisor, supervisor to purchasing, and each hop waits for someone to be at a desk. The shortage was visible at 7am and became a purchase order at 4pm the next day, which is a lead time you are paying for and nobody has ever put on a report.
Arda's inventory replenishment software puts a scannable card on every item you stock, on-BOM and off, starting with the shelf your ERP was never fed. The scan fires the reorder on its own. No stock check, no purchase order to type, no implementation project competing with the one you already have running. Scan a card, the material shows up.
The question an operations manager gets asked is never "does the card work." It is "does it still work when there are six lines and two addresses." Here is the whole answer, including what it costs at each step. The scope does not change as you scale: every item you stock is cardable, on-BOM and off. What changes is how many cards there are and who is looking at them.
Pick the line that stopped most often last quarter and card the items that stopped it. Off-BOM first, because that is where nothing is watching, then anything else on that line's bins. Cards go on the bin at the point of use, not in the stockroom, so the person who empties it is the person who scans it. There is no configuration project and no data migration, because the card carries the quantity and the supplier.
Every line gets its own card set on its own bins. That is not duplication, it is the mechanism: line four pulling the last box fires line four's reorder, and line one's buffer is untouched. Shared stock in the crib gets its own cards with the location on them, so a central shelf and a point-of-use shelf are two loops and not one argument. You roll out in the order your schedule allows, and a line that has not been carded yet keeps working exactly the way it does today.
A second location does not break replenishment because it is far away. It breaks because the informal process never travelled with it. Site one runs on somebody who has been there eleven years and can hear when a bin is low. Site two has none of that, and it will spend two years building its own version, differently. A card set is the process written down in a form that survives the move: same items, same quantities, same scan, printed and hung on site two's bins in an afternoon. Where site two uses a different supplier or a longer lead time, you resize those cards and nothing else changes.
Nothing in that sequence is a migration, and no stage requires the one before it to be redone. You are adding cards, and cards are additive by design.
Every stocked item gets a durable card with a QR code, from a bin at a workstation to a shelf in the crib to a rack of raw material. Whoever is standing there scans it with the phone already in their pocket. No scanner gun, no new login, no training day, and no reason for a shift to route it through anyone.
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, at the bin, in the building where the item gets used.
Card it this week, scan it next week, and take the before-and-after to the owner. Roll it across the rest of the plant once it has earned the argument.
The reason the inventory module never took is not that your people are careless. It is that every system you have asked them to feed adds a task to a job that is already full. Arda removes one instead. That is the whole reason compliance holds past week one, and it is the only honest answer to "what makes this different from the last rollout."
The card is the replenishment signal, on every item you stock. Nobody walks the shelves with a clipboard and nobody reconciles a number to make the screen true.
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.
Card sets copy. The quantities, the suppliers and the scan are identical at site two, so the second plant does not have to invent its own way of doing this.
One scan when a bin runs low, and the refill is already moving. Same motion on every line and every shift. Nothing to learn and nobody to find.
The shelf reorders itself at the right quantity, and you get a defensible number for the spend instead of a feeling. Orders fire without a stack of manual POs behind them, and every card's status sits in one view.
The shelf stops being a source of surprises, and the operations manager stops spending their week on it. No second system of record and no second implementation.
Three shops that started on a shelf, proved it, and extended it. None of them replaced the system they already ran, and none of them hired anyone to make it work.
Overland vehicle builder. Cards went on 100% of supplies inside a year, which is the answer to whether this stops at the pilot shelf. Holdings on critical components fell from 25+ to 5 while output went up 6×.
Read the Rossmonster case study →
Parts manufacturer and custom vehicle shop, after two ERP implementations had already failed. Cards went on the shelf instead, stockouts went to zero across the parts they stock, and the order backlog fell from 365+ days to 20.
Read the Fat Fender case study →Precision machine shop. Same building, same crew, same machines. Reordering moved onto cards and the shop tripled what it could push out the door.
Read the Austere case study →You probably have all three. That is normal at this size and it is not a failure of judgement. Here is what each one is actually good at, and what happens to each one when you add a line and then a building.
| Arda | Your ERP / MRP | The spreadsheet beside it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Signal to reorder | Scan a card at the bin, order fires automatically | A planning run against figures somebody entered | Somebody remembers to open it |
| Covers every stocked item | Yes, on-BOM and off, same card | Excellent on what it was configured and fed for | Whatever its author decided mattered |
| Who has to do something | Whoever empties the bin, once, in two seconds | A person at a desk, per transaction | One person, and only that person |
| What happens when you add a line | Print the card set for line two. Independent loops, no re-tuning | A configuration change, scheduled against everything else in the queue | A new tab, or a new file, or both |
| What happens when you add a site | Same cards, second location, one view across both | Depends what the licence and the rollout allow | Site two builds its own, differently |
| Cost to get started | $0 for your first 10 cards, unlimited users | Already paid for. The module is on the invoice either way | Free, until two versions disagree in a customer meeting |
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 and no queue behind your current one. Card one line 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 every shift at every site can scan from day one.
Assembly Industrial went from four builds at a time to eight in six months, and got 90 percent of its ordering time back doing it. Start on the line that stops most, on us, and let the shelf reorder itself while you build the case for the rest of the plant.
Free plan, unlimited users, and the system you already run stays exactly where it is.
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