Re-writing ERP Fundamentals

Our CEO & Co-Founder (Wiley Jones) recently sat down with Sri Rajagopalan and Peter V.S. Bond, hosts of the CPG Guys podcast, to explore how Doss is reshaping ERP for CPG and beyond. Catch the full episode to see how ERP is being reimagined on:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

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Posted below are notes I jotted down in preparation for the interview, I think they're an excellent supplemental POV on "what's on our minds" when talk about re-writing the fundamentals of ERP as an industry and class of solutions.

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Configure, Don't Customize

Each instance of DossARP is uniquely configured to solve the specific problems our customers face. What we find is that at least 80% of every business needs the same high-level structures and concepts. The final 20% of configuring a solution is where the idiosyncrasies all emerge (i.e. ABC Corp. calls something a "Stock Order" and XYZ Inc. calls it a "Work Order" and they're really talking about the same things).

Traditional ERPs fail to capture all of the weird, one-off, unique things that businesses do. And as it turns out, every business is kind of weird!

So we posed a really simple question. What if your ERP was designed around the weird and complex instead of the simple and straight-forward?

This is why configuration in Doss feels magical. Because we made a platform that allows businesses to capture what they do different, instead of forcing them to be the same.

The results are mind-blowing. In just minutes, our customers are able to iterate from base templates into comprehensive data models that characterize all of the weird things that make their business awesome.

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Already Have An ERP?

If a company already has existing systems, what benefit can they get from Doss? We get asked this question a lot.

Our response is a simple question in return. "Are you happy with how all of your existing systems fit together?" As you'd expect, we rarely hear "You know what, everything is great, there's no problems."

Instead, almost everyone has a handful (or more) of problems. Especially in larger organizations which have multiple mission critical systems that have evolved in complexity over many decades of growth, acquisitions, tuck-ins, and spinouts. And as a result, we end up hearing the same things over and over again:

• "Our CRM doesn't connect with our ERP, and have a WMS partially setup -- so no one really uses it."
• "To do reconciliation, I have to pull reports from 5 separate portals, every week. Ideally, I'd want to see these every day or in real-time, but I can't be spending that much time on data import/export.
• "Our team wants to do a transformation of a business unit we bought, we need to do a system rip-and-replace, the migration, all the change management, and more. Professional services firms are saying this'll take 9 months and cost $400,000. How are we supposed to do that?

Our answer: align our incentives with our customers goals and use DossARP as the conduit for transformation.

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Aligning Our Incentives with Customer Goals

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Notable 20th century author Upton Sinclair poetically describes the human nature of conflict between objectives and incentives. Charlie Munger, one of the founders of investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, puts in more directly: show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.

Our customers all have roughly the same goal, something along the lines of, "here are a few problems in our business, we want to implement solutions to address them."

So they bring in a solution vendor that the CFO worked with previously. They fly in on Monday, present many slide decks and whitepapers, conduct a lot of interviews, hold a roundtable dinner with leadership, and catch the redeye out on Thursday.

There are lots of circle-backs, check-ins, and cross-functional syncs but eventually the management team concludes they're making a prudent decision going with this provider. I mean, they've done thousands of projects like this? They know what they're doing.

The project gets kicked off. But this time the slides have gantts charts and schedules, process diagrams and workstreams, phase gates and people's names are tagged all over every document. There are more people flying in and out every week, camping out in conference rooms. Weekly updates get emailed around the project committee, text color-coded in red-yellow-green highlights. More dinners.

And then, the first invoice comes. The CFO emails the project committee.

CFO: Hi Mike, first bill came thru. Anything to flag or I can go ahead and pay it? $62,000. How are we tracking? Is anyone in the system yet?

Mike: Hey, FWDing latest weekly update to top of everyone's inbox. Status indicators are all green, except payroll, we've decided to punt to Q1. Will check with workstream leaders and send you a more detailed update.

More weeks of progress leading to more TODOs and WIP Updates, ??? and TBDs.

And then the second bill comes. And then third. And then it's Q1.

CFO: Team, we've racked up $397K on this program to date. Not including our own man-hours.

What parts are live? Last update shows Procurement, Inventory, and AP dates are going to miss again??

What have we accomplished?

We feel your pain fictional-strawman-CFO, we really do.

The culprit, in our opinion, is that there is a massive dissonance between the objective of the business (go live) and the incentive of the solution provider (bill hours).

Our answer to this is simple, but requires radical conviction in our own capabilities and competence.

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[1] Don't charge up-front for implementation, in any way, shape or form, at all, EVER.

The moment we ask for money before delivering value, we are admitting to ourselves and our customers that we can't go fast enough or that there is substantial risk involved in what we're about to do. Partnering with Doss should feel like a risk-free endeavor. Our customers should say, "They're going to figure this all out for us."

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[2] Build a Statement of Work to execute against and make it easy for the customer to void / cancel for non-performance.

We build a plan to execute and bill against. As we deliver E2E value, we bill.

OK, but why would you make it easy for unhappy customers to cancel? Well, because we don't want unhappy customers. And if we fail to serve them time-and-time again, they we haven't earned their business and they should find a better partner. We won't be able to hide poor performance, bad product, or bad service behind multi-year legal contracts.

This forces us to design EVERYTHING in our business and platform to serve the objective of our customers. It's easy to be overwhelmed by the fear of failure when setting an insanely high bar like this. But the equal and opposite reaction is even more powerful. If you succeed, means that now everyone else has to get on your level.

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[3] Understand comprehensively, implement sequentially, aggressively.

We parachute into a business, scrub through data, talk to everyone we can, deeply understanding their business, and then go step-by-step to aggressively implement every aspect of their solution.

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