For welding shops

Stop making it a walk-over-and-look problem. Put a two-bottle rule on each active gas type and a scannable card on the rack, so the moment a welder pulls the last full cylinder onto the bench they scan the card and the replacement is already ordered. A 125 to 150 cf cylinder at a normal 12 to 15 L/min flow gives roughly 10 to 12 hours of arc, which at a busy bench is two or three shifts, not a month. The card is sized against your gas house's delivery route, so the refill lands while there is still gas at the bench. More on the two-bin system.

One full spare per active gas type per bench, not one spare for the building. The number is set by your supplier's route rather than by your consumption. Most welding shops buy from a local gas house running a fixed two-day-a-week delivery, so an empty on Wednesday afternoon is a cold bench until Friday unless something already fired on Tuesday. Size the card to cover the gap between routes plus a shift of cushion, and the rack carries the answer instead of a person carrying it. Run C25, pure argon and a tri-mix and that is three cards, not one.

Most shops lease, and it changes where the signal has to live rather than whether you need one. A leased cylinder belongs to the gas house, so it never enters your ERP as inventory, and the rental or demurrage clock runs whether the bottle is full or empty. Owning kills the rental line but hands you the capital and the hydrotest dates, which is why leasing stays normal well past the point most shops expect. Either way the replenishment problem is identical, because ownership decides who holds the asset and the card decides when the refill leaves the gas house. Arda does not replace your supplier's cylinder balances or its rental billing. It runs the pull signal on your side of the fence: what to send, how much, and when, fired from the rack instead of remembered by a person, on the same route they already drive.

Put a second bin behind the first and card the empty one. The welder takes the last handful of 0.035 tips, scans the card, pulls the second bin forward, and the reorder is already moving before anyone has to ask for it. The same setup holds for nozzles, diffusers, liners, collets, gas lenses, alumina cups and each tungsten diameter, which is where most shops get caught: they hold four sizes of everything and run dry on exactly one. The empty bin is the signal, and the quantity is already on the card.

Usually consumable wear, not bad gas. A contact tip burned past its bore wanders the arc, a nozzle packed with spatter chokes the shield, and a plugged diffuser starves it, so coverage goes intermittent and the bead goes porous. The fix is a fresh tip and a clean nozzle at the bench, which only happens if there is a fresh one to reach for. Shops that card their gun consumables stop diagnosing a purchasing problem as a gas problem, because the box is never empty when the welder reaches into it.

Yes. Arda runs the replenishment loop for everything you stock and slots in where ERP and MRP fall hardest, on the variable-consumption goods that never make it onto a BOM. Your ERP keeps doing jobs, routing, and costing. It integrates with QuickBooks, NetSuite, Odoo, Xero, Shopify, Stripe, Airtable, Make, and Zapier, plus a REST API, so there is no rip and replace.

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.