Maksense Know Exactly When to Purchase More Materials with Katana
Maksense Know Exactly When to Purchase More Materials with Katana
“Katana’s automatic raw material management and simple entries system makes for a super easy solution. It’s a tool that tackles all our struggles in identifying material needs for both our MTO and our MTS products. We just wish we’d adopted it sooner.”
— Rafael Matos, Maksense
Company Profile
Company Profile
The aim of Maksense has always been to help clinical laboratories become more efficient, by making them do less. They have come up with brilliant technologies like the Indexor systems to keep test tubes organized in an intuitive, smart and simple way.
It’s an absolute wonder how much time laboratories must have spent managing all their test tubes and experiments without Maksense by their side.
Now though we can rely on the fact that brilliant scientists can spend less time searching for test tubes, and more time making our world a better place!
Challenges
Challenges
- Material purchasing;
- Time-consuming spreadsheets; and
- Inefficient production planning.
The greatest challenge for Maksense came in the form of efficient material purchasing. They wanted to make sure they weren't wasting money on overstocking whilst also ensuring that they always had the right materials available for production.
But considering they are a company that deals with both make-to-stock and make-to-order products, this was especially difficult without the right support. And the key was that they also wanted to do this without having to constantly trawl back and forth through spreadsheets.
“Before Katana we used a whole lot of spreadsheets with a whole lot of manual inputting – for both materials and production planning. This meant having to constantly refresh calculations even though we're pretty much advanced users. ” said Rafael from Maksense.
Objectives
Objectives
Quickly they realized that they were looking for a solution to help with:
- Raw material inventory management;
- Efficiency of day-to-day operations; and
- Production planning.
How Katana Helped
How Katana Helped
- Automated raw material management;
- Intuitive order prioritization; and
- Removed reliance on confusing spreadsheets.
The Maksense ethos comes down to making scientists’ lives easier so that they can focus on what’s important.
However, once the orders started rolling in for their own awesome products, they realized that staying on top of materials inventory and production planning was not so easy. It was getting in the way of focusing on the things that mattered for Maksense.
The reality is that creating beautifully complex and intricate products is no simple feat when there are so many materials involved. And that was especially the case for Rafael and the Maksense team, considering that multiple products were using the same materials, often being produced in parallel.
Katana’s smart auto-booking system helped solve this by calculating the required materials in real-time for them, whilst also highlighting when stocks were running low. That means Maksense no longer have to worry about having the right materials available when it counts.
But with the fact that they make products to order, it was also necessary to be able to change the priorities of orders whilst keeping track of their materials and production lines.
Using Katana’s intuitive drag-and-drop mechanism resolved this challenge, by allowing Maksense to see how adjustments to their production line would affect their delivery deadlines and material availability.
Rafael says that these changes have had a drastic effect on their efficiency levels and is especially amplified considering they got what they were after – an all-in-one solution.
After the move to Katana, Maksense say they now spend half the time they used to on tedious spreadsheet crawling and day-to-day operations.
