Arda gives a 10 to 75 person manufacturer real inventory control without an ERP project: put a scannable card on one part today, and when it runs low a scan fires the reorder. No implementation, no data to clean up first, and nobody to hire to run it. Your first ten cards are free, and the loop grows one shelf at a time.
Your first 10 cards are free. Works alongside your ERP, no rip and replace.
Trusted by manufacturers including Austere, Fat Fender, and Rossmonster.
A stockout is a reorder that fired too late, or never fired at all. In a shop of 10 to 75 people that reorder usually depends on one person having a spare five minutes, and that person is also quoting the next job. 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 stock runs low. It does not need anyone's attention to work, which is the only reason it is still working three months in.
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.
The system that survives is the one that does not need you.
Twenty-eight people. There is no ERP, because the last quote came back at more than the shop spends on material in a quarter, and there is a spreadsheet that was accurate in March. Ordering is not anybody's job, so it lands on whoever is closest to the shelf and least able to stop: the owner between quotes, or the lead between setups. It has worked for eleven years. It fails about four times a year, always in the same week, always the week the shop is full.
At thirty people every hire has to pay for itself on the floor, so the ordering gets absorbed by whoever already has the most to do. That leaves a purchasing function with no owner, no hours allocated to it, and no cover for the week that person is out.
Reordering happens in the gaps, and the gaps close the moment the shop fills up. So the shortage lands on the week you are running two shifts and quoting three jobs, which is the week it costs the most and the week nobody has ten minutes to prevent it.
The last system did not fail on features. It failed because it needed somebody to feed it, and the only person who could was also running the floor. At this size the question is never whether the software can do the job. It is whether it still runs in the month you stop looking at it.
Arda's inventory replenishment software for small manufacturers starts with one item, not with an implementation. You print a card, put it on the bin, and the first time somebody runs low they scan it with the phone already in their pocket. That fires the order at the quantity and the supplier already written on the card. It is the same inventory replenishment software Arda runs inside large plants, sized so a shop of fifteen can start it on a Tuesday afternoon for nothing.
Nobody at this size can stop for a rollout, so Arda is built to be adopted in pieces you can afford to abandon. Each stage below is a real stopping point. If the first one does not earn the second, you have lost an afternoon and no money.
There is no stage where somebody sits down and enters your whole item list. The list builds itself, one card at a time, in the order the shop actually needs it.
Every stocked item gets a durable card with a QR code, starting with the one part that stopped your last job. Whoever is standing there 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 being asked to remember. Expand across the floor when it has proven itself.
Tools that ask the floor for data fail because they add a task. Arda removes one. That is what holds compliance past week one, in a shop where nobody has a spare task to give.
The card is the replenishment signal on every item you stock, so there is no weekly upkeep and no back-office job created by adopting it.
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. Whoever is standing there 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. Nothing to learn and nobody to go and find.
At this size that is usually the same person doing invoices and scheduling. Orders fire at the right quantity with no stack of manual POs, and every card's status sits in one view: pulled, on order, restocked.
You stop being the purchasing department. Reordering comes off your list for good, and you get real consumption history to quote from instead of a feel for what things cost.
Shops in the ten to seventy-five range that started with a handful of cards instead of an ERP quote. None of them added a purchasing hire to get these numbers.
Parts manufacturer and custom vehicle shop that had already failed two ERP implementations before it tried cards. Stockouts eliminated across everything they stock, and an order backlog of 365+ days pulled down to 20.
Read the Fat Fender case study →Overland vehicle builder that grew straight through the size where most shops stall out. Cards went on 100% of supplies inside a year, and holdings on critical components fell from 25+ to 5 while output went up 6x.
Read the Rossmonster case study →Fabricator of custom trucks and metalwork. Weekly stockouts gone, and the floor went from four builds at a time to eight in six months, without a bigger shop or a bigger team.
Read the Assembly Industrial case study →The three real options for a shop this size, judged on what each one costs you in money and in attention before it does anything useful.
| 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, the floor skips data entry | Low, it rests on one person |
| Setup time | One part, one afternoon | Months, plus cleaning up your item list first | Fast, and it breaks as you grow |
| Works with your existing ERP | Yes, splices in, and works fine if you have none | It becomes the system of record | Disconnected from everything |
| Cost to get started | $0 for your first 10 cards, unlimited users | License plus implementation, before the first order | Free, until one shortage costs you a week |
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.
Connects to QuickBooks, NetSuite, Odoo, Xero and more if you have them. Works on its own if you do not.
Priced per card, not per seat, so the whole floor can scan from day one.
Austere Machining doubled revenue and tripled throughput without adding the purchasing hire that growth normally forces. Start with the one item that stopped your last job, on us, and let the shelf reorder itself.
Free plan, unlimited users, no ERP rollout.
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