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For businesses that sell physical goods, the directive is pretty straightforward: convert materials into finished products and sell those goods to customers.
Unfortunately, for most teams, this simple equation contains an entire universe of challenges:
- Managing vendors and manufacturers
- Sending payments and purchase orders
- Aggregating sales data
- Building forecasts
- Fulfilling customer orders
- Tracking production status
Over the years, I myself was responsible for aspects of these workflows. When things didn’t go as smoothly as planned, I’d find myself thinking “There has to be a way. Why are we making it so difficult?”
Surely someone had solved this problem. There had to be a tool or methodology that would fix everything. But, no matter where I looked, nothing could quite address the complexity of real-world businesses and meet them where they were.
It turns out it simply didn’t exist yet – someone would have to build it.
Small operations are simple operations
A small business can manage operations with a relatively simple approach. At this stage, adhering to best practices isn’t that important, and finding out what’s going on is pretty easy. Manual workflows and basic tools will get that small business pretty far.
But as this same business starts to mature, two things begin to happen:
- As demand increases, they need more employees, more warehouses, more suppliers, more retail partners, etc.
- To fuel continued growth, the company expands product offerings, services, and distribution channels.
Suddenly, the simple operation isn’t so simple anymore. With processes (and people) at max capacity and tools pushed beyond their capabilities, it’s only a matter of time before the business hits a ceiling. They can no longer meet demand —let alone pursue new opportunities.
Pushing through the growing pains
A scaling business can address its growing pains in two ways:
- Hire more people or ask existing employees, who are already overworked, to work longer hours.
- Use business software to aggregate information, encode processes, and enforce best practices.
Either one of these two solutions presents new and often unexpected challenges.
More people, more problems
On the surface, adding more people seems like a great solution. But it can be easy to underestimate the difficulty of getting new hires up to speed with workflows that are second nature to existing team members.
After exhausting a brute force “more people” strategy, they turn to a temporary measure: layering automation on top of existing consumer-grade tools like spreadsheets and email. But there’s no guarantee of best practices, and the spider web of systems becomes increasingly tangled as workflows get more complex.
Consequently, businesses stretch the patchwork of spreadsheets as far as possible until they have to bite the bullet and buy an ERP.
Traditional ERPs are too rigid
On one hand, a traditional ERP is great: you can consolidate data and handle regulatory trade and tax compliance. But ERP implementation carries a lot of risk.
The cost is high, and the odds of success aren’t in your favor (less than 50%). Even lightweight ERPs that are specific to an industry are often inflexible and tailored to a particular way of doing things.
Spreadsheets don’t scale and ERPs are only for really big companies
So many companies don't have a viable option because they've outgrown spreadsheets, but ERPs are just way too risky to implement. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place and the future of their company is at stake.
What if this wasn't the case? What if we took the best parts of these systems and combined them? What would it take to reconcile the contradictions?
It would mean challenging some fundamental assumptions about what an ERP is.
- We’d have to provide the rigor of enterprise software systems and the simplicity of consumer-grade tools.
- It would need to be easy to configure and match the nuance and complexity of the real world.
- Implementation would have to take only a few hours instead of 12-18 months.
- Our workflows and integrations would be iterative and could adapt in real-time.
These ideas became the guiding principles behind Doss, the first ERP-alternative designed for the real world.
Doss ARP is a modern solution for modern problems
Doss Adaptive Resource Platform (ARP) is an ERP-alternative. It consists of composable building blocks that make creating custom workflows as easy as drawing a flowchart.
It’s where your team goes for the source of truth about what's happening inside and outside your business.
Manage your data, your way
We’ve provided the basic building blocks you need to store and operationalize your data. Customize Doss to track what matters to you — from project status and product identifiers to invoice payments and more.
Create a centralized system and put it on autopilot
Use Doss Workflows to centralize information from 3rd-party systems into an up-to-date, composite ‘source of truth.’
- Aggregate sales orders across platforms like Shopify, Amazon, and wholesale/retail EDI portals
- Automate email tagging and parsing, routing crucial information directly into Doss
- Consolidate PO issuing from a multi-day process down to just a few clicks
Go live in minutes, not months
Doss ARP requires near-zero implementation effort. You’ll meet with our team to map out your workflows and configure them live in Doss. Within minutes, we’ll be iterating on your Doss instance together.
Once we’re both satisfied we’ll migrate in all of your relevant data (CSVs, your CRM, Shopify, QuickBooks, etc), and then it’s off to the races.
Now it’s your turn
Get started today with our 30-day risk-free trial. No contract, no credit cards, nothing required. Since Doss is so easy to configure, we don't charge anything to get you set up.
This release of Doss ARP (v1.0) marks a major milestone for us and our customers.
We’re just getting started and so are you.
