Switch from Katana MRP
Katana was built for fulfillment. You're a manufacturer.
Katana handles inventory and purchasing well for ecommerce sellers moving finished goods. But you have a shop floor — routings, work centers, operators, and jobs with due dates. That's where it runs out.
Why manufacturers outgrow Katana
Switching costs less than another year of working around the fit. We bring your parts, BOMs, and routings across with AI-assisted migration, and you're running in weeks.
Built for kitting and shipping
Katana assumes finished goods arrive and leave. The work in between — routings, operations, work centers — is barely modeled.
Built for making things
Multi-level BOMs, routings, and operations are the core of the system. Every job has a route, and every route has work centers and operators behind it.
No real work scheduling
When every order is pick-and-pack, you don't need a schedule. When you have machines, operators, and promised dates, you do.
Jobs, routing, and scheduling
Prioritize jobs, assign operations to machines, and see what's actually running. A schedule change ripples through instead of being retyped.
Inventory first, production second
Stock levels are the center of the model, and production is something that happens to inventory along the way.
Production first
Demand aggregates across sales orders, jobs, and stock, so purchasing follows what you're actually building rather than what a min/max rule expects.
Your shop floor is still on paper
Operators can't see what's next, what changed, or what the print says — so the office becomes the interface.
The floor sees what the office sees
Live job status, work instructions, drawings, and files at the machine. Time and quantities captured as a side effect of the work.
My experience with StartProto has been fantastic. It feels like it was designed from the manufacturing floor up and then expanded into ERP capabilities, which is different from anything else out there. Their training support has also been great—they’re available off-hours, which works well with my busy schedule. That level of support makes StartProto stand out.
—
Warren Wadman
Operations
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