Trading & distribution
Buying, holding and reselling across suppliers, branches and price lists, with margin that has to survive the whole chain.
Solutions
Start from what is broken, not from a feature list.
Nobody buys inventory software because they want inventory software. They buy it because stock figures are wrong and it is costing them orders. A solution is the set of apps and workflows that fixes a particular problem end to end.
Where it usually hurts
Nine problems businesses come to us with.
Two have a page of their own so far. The rest are described here, and every one of them is something we have been asked to fix.
Import & export
Cross-border consignments where the documentation, the compliance and the landed cost matter as much as the goods.
Inventory management
Stock figures nobody trusts, availability that cannot be read, and counting as the only way to find out what is really there.
Warehouse management
Goods that are in the building but nobody can say which bin, and picking that depends on who is on shift.
Dispatch management
A loading plan held in a spreadsheet, short shipments agreed at the gate, and no record of what actually left.
Logistics management
Freight cost that never reaches the order it was spent on, and delivery status that lives in a phone call.
Multi-company
A group running two or four legal entities on two or four separate systems, and a consolidated view that takes a week to produce.
Multi-branch
Branches with their own stock and their own customers, where head office cannot see either without asking.
SME business management
A business that has outgrown spreadsheets but is not ready to be told it needs a two-year ERP programme.
Apps and solutions
An app is a capability. A solution is an arrangement of them.
The two are not competing ways of buying. Every solution below is built out of the same apps in the catalogue — what a solution adds is the order they go in, the workflow between them and the configuration that makes them fit a way of working.
An app answers
“Can it track stock across three warehouses?”
A question about capability. The answer is in the app catalogue, and it is the same answer whatever business is asking.
A solution answers
“How do we stop promising stock we have already sold?”
A question about a business problem. Answering it takes inventory, sales and dispatch, arranged so a reservation happens at the right moment — which is what a solution page describes.
By stage of business
The same platform at four sizes.
What changes between these is how many apps are switched on, not which product you are running.
Small business
Core OS plus sales, purchase and basic inventory. Enough to stop running the business out of a spreadsheet, and no more than that.
Growing business
Warehouse operations and multi-branch added, because stock is now in more than one place and more than one person is selling it.
Mid-market
Trade, dispatch, logistics and finance, so the whole chain from order to delivery to invoice is one connected sequence.
Enterprise
Several companies, deeper approval workflows, integrations to systems that are not going anywhere, and reporting across all of it.
FAQ
Questions about solutions.
Do we buy a solution or do we buy apps?
Apps. A solution is how we describe a set of them arranged around a problem, along with the configuration and workflow that make the arrangement work. What appears on the quote is the Core OS, the apps you activate, and the implementation to set them up that way.
What if our problem is two of these at once?
That is the usual case — a distributor with a warehouse problem, or an importer with a multi-company one. Because the apps underneath are shared, two solutions overlapping means fewer apps, not more.
Where do we start if several things are broken?
With whichever one is costing the most money, not whichever is easiest to fix. Getting the Core OS and one painful workflow right is worth more than switching on six apps that are all half configured.
Only two of the nine have a page. Are the others available?
Yes — what is missing is the page, not the capability. Every one of the nine is built from apps that exist today. We are writing the pages in the order businesses ask for them.
Have a different question? Talk to us.
Tell us the problem, not the shortlist.
Describe what goes wrong in a normal week. We will tell you which apps address it and which you can leave alone.