Manufacturers depend on inventory to keep production moving, maintenance teams prepared, and materials available where the work happens. But plant inventory is often managed across spreadsheets, paper records, disconnected applications, or custom tools that make it difficult to answer a few basic questions:
Kanoa Inventory is now generally available as part of Kanoa MES 1.15.
Kanoa Inventory provides a structured foundation for managing parts, raw materials, finished goods, consumables, critical spares, repairable components, and serialized items inside the same Kanoa MES and Ignition environment used for production operations.
An inventory quantity is more useful when teams can connect it to the place where the material is stored and the equipment or operation it supports.
Kanoa Inventory builds on the asset hierarchy and operational foundation established by Kanoa Ops. Storerooms and inventory locations become part of the same plant structure used to organize sites, areas, lines, and equipment across Kanoa MES.
That shared foundation helps teams understand not only how much inventory is available, but where it is stored and which plant assets it may support. Kanoa Inventory extends the Ops asset model with parts, bins, stocking policies, transactions, suppliers, manufacturers, and equipment bills of materials—all within the same Ignition-powered environment.
Kanoa Inventory starts with a structured definition of the physical items a plant needs to manage.
Part records can include:
This shared catalog gives inventory, operations, and maintenance teams a consistent reference for the materials and components used throughout the plant.
Parts can also be associated with equipment bills of materials at the model or individual asset level. This connects spare-parts information to plant equipment and helps teams identify the components associated with a particular machine or asset type.
Inventory does not exist only as a plant-wide total. The same part may be held in multiple storerooms, shelves, racks, drawers, or other site-defined bins.
Kanoa Inventory organizes stock by inventory location and optional bin. Teams can review on-hand, reserved, on-order, and available quantities where that information is maintained, along with the unit of measure and managed-stock status for each part and location.
This location-level view helps answer a practical question that a total quantity alone cannot: where can the part actually be found?
Different parts—and different locations—often require different stocking strategies.
Kanoa Inventory supports location-specific policies including:
These policies give teams a structured way to define how inventory should be managed at each location. They can help identify materials that require attention without assuming that reaching a threshold automatically creates or submits a purchase order.
A current stock balance tells only part of the story. Inventory teams also need to understand how that balance changed.
Kanoa Inventory records receipts, issues, transfers, returns, and adjustments as structured transactions. Depending on the workflow, a transaction can preserve context including:
Corrections can be captured through adjustment transactions rather than rewriting prior history. This preserves the sequence of inventory movements and the operational context associated with them.
Kanoa Inventory and Kanoa Trace both work with material context, but they answer different questions.
Kanoa Inventory focuses on plant inventory and storeroom workflows: parts, stock levels, locations, suppliers, stocking policies, and inventory transactions. It helps teams understand what is in stock, how much is available, where it is stored, and how it moved.
Kanoa Trace focuses on production genealogy: lots, serials, inputs, outputs, transformations, routes, and trace events. It helps teams understand what went into a manufactured product, what it became, where it moved through production, and how related outputs are connected.
Manufacturers can use the two Solutions together when they need both plant inventory management and detailed production genealogy.
When Kanoa Maintenance is also licensed, technicians can issue parts from Kanoa-managed inventory directly to maintenance work-order events.
The resulting inventory transaction stays connected to the maintained asset, technician, quantity, and maintenance activity where the part was used. This gives maintenance and storeroom teams a clearer record of parts consumption while keeping inventory and work management inside Kanoa MES.
Kanoa Inventory also supports plant inventory requirements beyond maintenance, including raw-material, finished-goods, consumable, and general storeroom workflows.
Kanoa Inventory is delivered as a licensed Solution within Kanoa MES—not as a separate software stack.
For manufacturers, it brings inventory workflows closer to the operational environment they support. For systems integrators and Ignition developers, it provides a productized inventory-management foundation that can be configured and extended using familiar Ignition tools.
Plant-specific interfaces, reports, workflows, and integrations can be implemented through Ignition where requirements call for them. Kanoa Inventory can coordinate with ERP, purchasing, warehouse, barcode, scanner, database, or other adjacent systems when those connections are implemented for the customer environment.
Kanoa Inventory is generally available beginning with Kanoa MES 1.15. It is a $5,000 add-on Solution built on the Kanoa Ops foundation.
If your team manages plant inventory through paper, spreadsheets, a disconnected system, or a custom Ignition application—and wants a more structured way to connect stock with plant locations and equipment—schedule a conversation with the Kanoa team.
We are excited to see what manufacturers and Ignition integrators build with Kanoa Inventory.