Satra or your factory ERP? Keep the ERP.

Keep your ERP for the order and use Satra for everything before it, from the buyer’s inquiry to the approved sample. The two do different jobs.

Where the ERP starts

An ERP is built around a confirmed order. It knows the PO, the bill of materials, the production plan and the shipment. It is good at that work, and nothing here asks you to change it.

Sampling happens before any of that exists. There is no PO for a proto sample, no confirmed quantity for a fit round, and often no style number the ERP would recognise. So the work has nowhere to live.

What happens before the order

An inquiry arrives, often on WhatsApp, with a photo or a sketch. The merchandiser costs it. Stores pulls fabric and trims, the pattern master cuts a first pattern, and the sample room makes the sample. It goes to the buyer by courier. The buyer comes back with comments, and the round starts again. Fit, size set, PP, TOP.

Each round crosses four departments and a courier. Each handoff is a moment where a sample can sit on a bench for two days without anyone noticing.

Why it ends up in Excel and WhatsApp

Because that is what is left. A spreadsheet that one person updates becomes the record, and a WhatsApp group becomes the way the floor reports progress. Both work until the person who keeps the sheet is on leave, or the message that mattered is two hundred messages up.

The status in that sheet is typed by hand, after the fact. Nobody can see which sample is stuck until someone asks.

What Satra does

Satra gives each department its own station on a tablet or a laptop. Merchandising, stores, pattern and the sample room each sign in on their own link and see only their own work.

• Every job carries three stamps. Issued, received and ready. Nobody types a status, because the stage is worked out from the stamps.
• A sample idle for two days is flagged.
• Each handoff keeps its proof. A photo, the buyer’s reply, the courier number.
• Each round records the buyer’s verdict, approved, rejected or pending, with the reason for any rejection.
• The T&A calendar for each style is planned from the start and ship dates, and known steps fill in their own actual dates.
• Performance by department and by buyer sits on its own screen, for the admin and the bulk merchandiser.

It runs in a browser on the laptops and tablets you already have, and it is live in days.

Where Satra fits

If your sampling runs on a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group, Satra replaces those two, and the ERP stays exactly where it is.

Send us one of your styles on WhatsApp and we will walk it through Satra, from the inquiry to the buyer’s answer.