Material tracking in Katana involves monitoring the stock levels and usage of raw materials throughout the production process. This helps businesses maintain accurate inventory records, ensuring that the necessary materials are available for manufacturing while avoiding overstocking or shortages.
Materials can have a tracking set to either No tracking or Batch / lot numbers
Tracking on a material card
Within the Item card of a material, you'll find the two options for tracking:
No tracking is used if item traceability is not required.
Batch / lot numbers tracking allows you to assign batch or lot numbers to purchased and manufactured items. This enables you to track batches for products and materials in your stock. You can also assign expiration dates to batches to give further control over the shelf life of your items.
Batch / lot number tracking is set at an item level so it also affects the variants of the item. However, enabling or disabling batch / lot numbers tracking for an item will not affect other items. Batch / lot numbers tracking is included in the Full Traceability add-on only available on Standard plans (automatically enabled for Professional plans).
If you're enabling batch tracking for an item that already has stock, all existing items are assigned to a batch called unbatched.
NOTE: Turning off batch tracking for an item will also delete batch tracking information for all variants of that item. The same applies if you switch serial number tracking to No tracking.
If you enable batch tracking for an item and you've already created batch numbers, disabling the functionality will delete existing batch tracking information from Katana for that item. We recommend exporting historical batch tracking info before disabling by exporting the data to a CSV file.
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