P/N
Minimum
Location
Order
Supplier
For tool, die and mold shops
Keep a missing sleeve from holding up the next tool. Set Arda cards for the EDM wire you use every week and the components that take longer to arrive. Scan at the reorder point to give each part the lead time it needs.
P/N
2×
throughput
10 min
a day ordering, from 2–3 hours a week
Assembly Industrial · heavy-industry fabricator
Weekly stockouts gone, and the floor went from four builds at a time to eight. No bigger shop and no bigger team.
One shelf, three rhythms, and no single reorder date that fits
Wire goes by the spool, dielectric filters go by run hours, and an ejector sleeve goes by whenever a mold comes back broken. One calendar reorder is wrong for all three at once. Arda sizes each card to its own item instead: spools on the wire rack against a few days of lead time, filters and DI resin on their own quantity, and a sleeve you cannot buy in a day carried at a safety stock that admits it. The scan is the order, so the weekend run stops depending on who last looked at the rack. Same card on electrode blanks, die springs and tool steel.
The shelf did not fail. The signal did.
The fast movers outrun the paperwork and the slow movers have no rhythm at all
A tool room stocks what it burns in a week beside what it touches once a year, on the same shelf, in the same room. Both stop a build, and a system built for one of those populations is blind to the other.
The weekend run dies at 2 a.m.
The wire machine was loaded to cut through the weekend and the spool ran out on Saturday night, or the filter loaded up and pressure tripped it. Nobody was there. Monday morning the job is exactly where it was Friday, the try-out date has moved, and the shop paid for two days of floor space to watch a machine sit.
The tool is in pieces and the pin is a special
A mold comes back for repair with a broken ejector sleeve, or a die galls a wear plate on a Friday shift. Everyone assumed a common size was on the shelf because it is a common size. It is not, the replacement is two weeks out, and the customer's press is down for every one of those days.
One shelf, three rhythms, one reorder date
Wire goes by the spool, filters go by run hours, resin goes by resistivity, and a bushing set goes by the year. A calendar reorder is wrong for all four at once, and an ERP min/max set for one wire machine is fiction the day you buy the second.
How does inventory replenishment work in a tool, die and mold shop using Arda?
Arda's inventory replenishment software for tool, die and mold shops puts a scannable card on every item you stock, and sizes each card to that item's own burn rate and its own supplier lead time. A spool you go through in a week and a guide bushing set you touch once a year get the same card and the same scan, with different quantities encoded on them. No purchase order to type, no ERP rollout. Scan the card, the material shows up.
Built for both halves of the shelf, the weekly burn and the once-a-year spare
Fast movers are where the noise is, because they empty faster than anyone writes them down. Slow movers are where the damage is, because a bin that goes empty in March is not missed until October. The same card handles both, on-BOM or off, and each one is sized to its own item. These are ordered the way the shelf actually behaves: weekly on the left, yearly on the right. Everything here is what you build and repair tools from, not press-side spares.
- EDM wire spools
- Dielectric filters & DI resin
- EDM wear parts
- Electrode blanks, graphite & copper
- Graphite & hard-milling perishables
- Polishing stones & diamond compound
- Ejector pins & sleeves
- Die springs & nitrogen springs
- Punches & die buttons
- Leader pins & guide bushings
- Tool steel & mold bases
- Hot runner & water fittings
Scan the card when a bin runs low
Every stocked item gets a durable card with a QR code, from a spool rack to a drawer of ejector pins to a plate of P20 on the material rack. A toolmaker scans it with any phone, no extra hardware, no login friction.
The order fires automatically
The reorder goes out at the card's quantity to the supplier on that card, sized to that item's own lead time rather than to a shared reorder date. Nobody types a purchase order.
See every card, pulled to restocked
Pulled, on order, restocked, per rack and per machine. The office can see a special is on order weeks before the tool comes back needing it.
Each card encodes a proven loop sized to what the item actually does: reorder point, the two-bin system, min/max levels, and safety stock. Buy a second wire machine and you resize one card, not a spreadsheet. This is the same loop Arda's inventory replenishment software runs in every trade it serves.
EDM wire, 0.010" brass
Reorder qty
4 spools
Lead time
4 days
Supplier
Penn Tool Co.
Safety stock
2 spools
Scanned 07:52
PO sent 07:52
Restocked
Start with the one part that stalled your last job
Card it today, scan it tomorrow, and see the reorder fire without anyone counting. Expand across the tool room when it has proven itself.
Make Free Kanban CardsFree plan, no credit card
Precision shops running Arda cards
Tool rooms and precision shops that put a card on the shelf, on the fast movers and the slow ones, and got their throughput and their hours back without adding people or machines.
6 months
to pay off the rollout
Zero
new hires or new machines
Austere MFG
Precision machine shop. Zero new hires, zero new machines. The one change was how material got reordered, and the owner got the hours back for quoting.
Read the Austere case study →5×
production
80%
less inventory held
Rossmonster
Overland vehicle builder. Cards went on 100% of supplies inside a year. Production is up five times, and the shelf carries a fifth of what it did: 25+ down to 5 on critical components.
Read the Rossmonster case study →See how we compare
Arda vs ERP vs spreadsheets for tool and die
For the items that stop a wire machine on a Saturday night, here is how the three common approaches stack up in a tool room.
ArdaERP / MRPSpreadsheet / memory
Signal to reorderScan a card, order fires automaticallyManual entry, then a planning runSomeone remembers to look
Covers every stocked itemYes, on-BOM and off, same cardOn-BOM only, misses the restOnly if updated by hand
Shop-floor complianceHigh, scanning is the easy pathLow, floor skips data entryLow, depends on one person
Setup timeStart with one part in a dayMonths of implementationFast, but breaks as it grows
Works with your existing ERPYes, splices in, no rip and replaceIt is the ERPDisconnected from it
Cost to get started$0 on the free planHigh license and rollout costFree, until a stockout costs a day
Frequently asked questions
Which EDM consumables should always be in stock?
Wire at the diameters you actually cut, dielectric filters, deionization resin, and a working set of wear parts: wire guides, power feed contacts and flush nozzles. Filters are consumed by run hours, commonly 200 to 400 of them, and worn contacts slow the cut without setting off an alarm, so the trade guidance is to keep fresh ones on hand. Each of those gets its own card sized to its own burn rate, which is exactly why one shared reorder date never works for the group.
How much of a slow-moving mold component should a tool room hold?
Enough to cover the wait, and usually not more. On a slow mover the consumption side of the sum is small and the lead time side is large, so for most shops the answer is one buffer set of the sizes their tools actually use. The card sits on that buffer. Scanning it starts the two-week clock the moment the shelf drops to one, instead of the morning the tool is already apart on the bench and the customer's press is down. See the reorder point formula.
Does kanban work for expensive, slow-moving tooling, or only for consumables?
Both, because kanban does not care how fast an item moves. It cares that the buffer covers the lead time. A fast mover like EDM wire gets a small buffer and a short cycle. A slow mover like a nitrogen gas spring gets a single buffer unit and a long one. The scan is the same motion either way, so the floor learns one habit and that one habit covers the whole shelf.
Will this cover the mold components on our bill of materials, or only the shop supplies?
Both. In a tool room the expensive shortages are usually on-BOM, a leader pin set or a plate of P20, and the ERP sees the money without ever seeing the shelf. Ejector pins, guide bushings, die springs, punches, plate stock and hot runner spares all get a card, and so do the wire, filters and stones nothing was watching in the first place. Your ERP keeps doing jobs, routing and costing. Arda runs the replenishment loop underneath it.
How much does Arda cost, and is there a free trial?
Create unlimited items and cards on Free, without Order Queue access. Solo includes one user and up to 10 orders a month after its 7-day trial. Team and Pro are priced per Power User and include unlimited scanning for your team. Compare current plans and billing.
Ten cards on the wire machine, and the weekend runs itself
Assembly Industrial rolled Arda out in days and doubled what its floor could build, with no bigger shop and no bigger team. Start with the one item that moved your last try-out date, on us, and let the shelf reorder itself.
Free plan, unlimited cards, no ERP rollout.