P/N
Minimum
Location
Order
Supplier
For woodworking and cabinet shops
Keep the next cabinet moving from assembly to finish. Put Arda cards with the glue, abrasives and catalyst your shop runs through every day. Scan when supplies run low to start the reorder before they hold up the work.
P/N
20
day backlog
0
stockouts
Fat Fender · custom vehicle shop, after two failed ERP implementations.
The order backlog ran past 365 days. It came down to 20, and the stockouts went to zero.
The reorder stops depending on the finisher noticing
A kitchen goes through the booth once. Everything upstream can be resequenced, so the shortage that costs you an install date is a case of acid catalyst on the booth shelf, not a sheet of ply. Arda puts the reorder on that shelf: the card carries the quantity and your supplier's lead time. The catalyst gets a card of its own, because it is bought apart from the finish, it runs its own pot life once mixed, and it is on nobody's cut list. Same card on edgeband rolls, edgebander glue, abrasive belts and the undermount slides the crew opens at install.
The shelf did not fail. The signal did.
Your finishing room stops over a $90 case of catalyst, and nothing saw it coming
Cabinet shops run high-mix, one-off work with almost no system underneath it. The owner is still the purchasing department, ordering between a site visit, a quote and a punch list, and the items that stop a kitchen are the ones no cut list ever reaches.
The finishing room is where a shortage becomes a missed install
Everything upstream can be resequenced. If the nest is short a sheet you cut something else, but a kitchen goes through the booth once, so an empty catalyst bottle or a loaded exhaust filter stops the only station that has no workaround. The shortage costs a $90 case and an install date the countertop template is stacked behind.
A full pail of varnish with no catalyst is a pail of nothing
Catalyst is bought separately from the finish, has its own pot life once mixed, and is the one item on the shelf that is worthless alone. It is also the one nobody thinks of as stock, because it is not on the cut list, not in the quote, and not on any schedule.
The hardware shortage shows up in the customer's kitchen
Slides and hinges are quoted per job and stocked by habit, so the gap surfaces at install rather than in the shop. Boxes are built, doors are finished, the truck is loaded, and the crew opens the last carton to find four pair of undermount slides for a nine-drawer bank.
How does inventory replenishment work in a cabinet shop using Arda?
Arda puts a scannable card on every item you stock, starting with the ones no cut list ever reaches, so the scan fires the reorder on its own. No tallying, no purchase order to type, no ERP rollout. Scan a card, the material shows up. Cabinet shops are one of the trades covered by Arda's inventory replenishment software.
Built for everything a cabinet shop holds, not just what it burns through
Consumables are where the pain is loudest, because a cut list gives you the panel and the hinge and never the glue pellets, the 180 grit, the catalyst, or the cone strainers that turn a stack of sheets into a finished kitchen. But the same card works on anything you stock, on-BOM or off. Put a card on it and the shortage disappears.
- Sanding abrasives & belts
- Edge banding
- Edgebander glue & wear parts
- Wood glue & contact cement
- Pins, staples & confirmat screws
- Varnish, sealer & acid catalyst
- Spray booth & gun consumables
- CNC bits, blades & boring tooling
- Spoilboard, vacuum pods & dust collection
- Slides, hinges & shelf pins
- Sheet goods & panel stock
- Lumber, doors & delivery materials
Scan the card when a bin runs low
Every stocked item gets a durable card with a QR code, from a rack of edgeband rolls to a shelf of catalyst to a pallet of prefinished ply. A cabinetmaker or the finisher 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 already on the card, so the catalyst is moving before the booth runs out of it. Nobody types a purchase order.
See every card, pulled to restocked
Purchasing and the owner watch which cards are pulled, on order, or restocked across the bench, the booth and the panel line, 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.
Conversion varnish, acid catalyst
Reorder qty
4 cases
Lead time
4 days
Supplier
Sherwin-Williams Industrial
Safety stock
1 case
Scanned 07:52
PO sent 07:52
Restocked
Start with the one thing that moved your last install date
Card it today, scan it tomorrow, and see the reorder fire without anyone walking the aisle. Expand across the booth, the edgebander and the slide-and-hinge shelf when it has proven itself.
Make Free Kanban CardsFree plan, no credit card
One-off, high-mix shops running on Arda cards
None of these are cabinet shops, and one of them works wood every day. What they share with a cabinet shop is the operating model: every unit is effectively a custom job, the mix changes week to week, and the owner was the one doing the ordering.
5×
production
80%
less inventory held
Rossmonster
Custom vehicle builder with an in-house wood shop, running maple slab door cabinetry, oak flooring and custom galley casework. Cards went on 100% of supplies inside a year, holdings on critical components fell from 25+ to 5, and production runs five times higher on that fifth of the stock.
Read the Rossmonster case study →2x
throughput
10 min
a day ordering, from 2–3 hours a week
Assembly Industrial
Heavy-industry 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 →6 months
to pay off the rollout
Zero
new hires or new machines
Austere MFG
Precision machine shop. More going out of the same building with the same crew, after the reorder loop moved onto cards at the point of use.
Read the Austere case study →Arda vs cabinet software vs spreadsheets
Most cabinet shops do not have an ERP. They have Cabinet Vision, Microvellum or Mozaik on the design side and QuickBooks on the money side, and the shelf is on nobody's screen at all. For the items that actually stop a kitchen, here is how the three real options stack up on the floor.
ArdaERP / cabinet softwareSpreadsheet / memory
Signal to reorderScan a card, order fires automaticallyReports what a job consumed. Never places the order.Someone remembers to look
Covers every stocked itemYes, on-BOM and off, same cardCut list items only. The glue pot and the booth sit outside it.Only if updated by hand
Shop-floor complianceHigh, scanning is the easy pathLow. The finisher does not open Cabinet Vision.Low, depends on one person
Setup timeStart with one item in a dayWeeks of catalog, library and machine setupFast, but breaks as it grows
Works with your existing ERPYes, splices in, no rip and replaceIt is the design and engineering system. Most shops have no ERP behind it.Disconnected from everything
Cost to get started$0 on the free planLicense and training per workstation, none of it aimed at the shelfFree, until a shortage moves an install date
Frequently asked questions
How do you manage supplies in a cabinet shop without hiring a purchasing person?
Put the reorder signal at the point of use instead of leaving it to whoever notices the shelf looks light. Each family gets a bin and a card sized to how fast the shop burns it plus the supplier's lead time: grits at the sanding bench, glue pellets at the edgebander, catalyst and strainers at the booth, slides and hinges at the assembly table. With Arda, the card carries a QR code, and scanning it fires the reorder automatically. The owner stops being the purchasing department without anyone being hired to replace them, because the reorder no longer needs a person to start it. See how Arda works.
Why doesn't our cabinet software catch when we run out of catalyst or edgeband?
Because Cabinet Vision, Microvellum, Mozaik and the rest are design, engineering and optimization tools. They generate a cut list and a nest, and they can report the linear feet of edgeband a job consumes, but reporting consumption is not the same as placing an order. Nothing in that chain owns a 328 ft roll or a case of acid catalyst on the shelf. Arda runs the replenishment loop for exactly those items and slots in alongside whatever you already use, which keeps doing design, engineering and quoting.
How much finishing material and edge banding should a cabinet shop keep on hand?
Enough to cover your supplier's lead time at your real burn rate, plus a cushion for the weeks the schedule gets heavy. The formula is average daily consumption multiplied by lead time in days, plus safety stock. A shop that goes through two gallons of conversion varnish a day, on a distributor that delivers twice a week, with two gallons of safety stock, reorders at eight. Arda carries that number on the card itself, so the quantity sits at the booth door instead of in a formula somebody redoes when the mix shifts from paint grade to stain grade. See the reorder point formula.
Can a kanban system work in a custom cabinet shop where every job is different?
Yes, and custom work is the reason it beats forecasting. Kanban does not predict what the next kitchen needs. It replaces stock at the rate the shop actually consumes it, so a month of white melamine closets and a month of stained white oak both get replenished correctly without anyone rebuilding a forecast. The cards absorb the variability. When a run changes the burn rate on one item, you resize that one card and the rest of the shop is unaffected. More on the two-bin system.
What does Arda cost for a cabinet shop, and can we start small?
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, one finishing room, no more missed install dates
Rossmonster had cards on 100% of supplies inside a year, with no purchasing hire and no rollout project. Start where it hurts most, on us, and let the shelf reorder itself.
Free plan, unlimited cards, no ERP rollout.