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. However, there are no tools that could help them grow their businesses efficiently: Excel spreadsheets do not scale, and the myriad of resource planning platforms are too expensive, overcrowded, and lack essential integrations to other business-critical platforms (e-commerce, accounting, etc).
At the same time, more and more companies are starting to sell their products directly to the consumer. They cut out the middlemen, like the classical brick and mortar resellers and wholesalers, and use scalable e-commerce platforms instead. This is called the direct-to-consumer revolution.
In any small manufacturing business that sells directly to consumers, processes like sales, production, inventory and purchasing are treated as a single unified flow. Modern direct-to-consumer business is not just manufacturing, but it is retail, distribution and production combined. This business flow is very different from traditional manufacturing, where products are made to stock and there is no direct communication between producers and buyers. This is why most large enterprises operate in silos, where different functions are usually split into separate departments. Direct-to-consumer businesses cannot operate in silos.
There are no software solutions on the market that could treat workshop management processes as a unified flow as the modern direct-to-consumer manufacturers need. After a business grows out from Excel sheets, the next step is usually enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. These are one-size-fits-all solutions focused on large enterprise needs, loaded with functionalities that are not needed by small businesses.
This problem pertains to 2+ million micro- and small-sized manufacturing enterprises in Europe; and around 250-500 000 in the US. The success of small entrepreneurs is fundamental for European economy, making Katana’s platform an enabler for driving forward the European competitiveness on a global scale.
Our overall objectives of the Phase 1 project were to validate the economic and technical viability of scaling Katana smart workshop platform globally and to prepare for a high-potential Phase 2 project. Our key objective was to work on improving our business model to address more complex segments, such as small-scale batch manufacturing, as well as wider potential customer base in general. From the technical point of view, the objective was to establish a detailed feature development roadmap, feeding into the product development and scaling strategy to be followed up in the Phase 2 project.
