| abstract: |
People all over the world are increasingly empowered to seek fulfilment in their lives by turning passions into daily jobs. Scalable sales channels like Etsy and Amazon help them do so, by making it possible to find buyers even for the most niche businesses. However, there are no affordable tools besides Excel that could help designers, crafters and small manufacturers manage their operations efficiently. Spreadsheets do not scale with a growing business. There are a myriad of resource planning platforms out there, but for small businesses, they are too expensive, overcrowded with unnecessary features, or lack essential integrations to other widely used platforms (e-commerce, accounting, etc).
In any small business, processes like sales, production, inventory and purchasing are treated as a single unified flow. This is very different from large enterprises, in which functions like these are split into departments. Small manufacturers need a solution that would help them manage daily work from sourcing raw materials, to manufacturing and sales, to distribution and shipping.
Katana is the first Smart Workshop Software, designed to revolutionise the way modern designers, crafters and makers work. Katana is the only affordable smart workshop management software on the market, which scales seamlessly as its users’ grow their businesses. Katana brings Industry 4.0 to the hands of small entrepreneurs by helping them automate and scale their daily work.
Our clients are designers, crafters, makers and small entrepreneurs: over 2 million micro- and small-sized manufacturing enterprises in Europe and around 250 000 in the US. The platform and our business model are validated by paying customers. The main objective of the Phase 1 project is to further develop our business model to address more complex client segments, to establish a detailed feature development roadmap for different industries and types of users, and to prepare for a high-potential Phase 2 project. |
