The Gordian Knot of Inventory Management

I’ve ordered cups to 30 Blue Bottle Cafes. I’ve spoken to a Cafe Lead in Japan who was able to consistently manage his pastry waste to 50% less than his peers. I’ve begged warehouse managers to unload boxes from the truck into an ordered queue based on an algorithm I wrote. I’ve packed the same 3 bolts into over 5,000 small boxes in a single day.

Operations and inventory management is hard work. For over a decade, I have seen technology incrementally improving what’s possible in this space, but the real unlock comes from merging three distinct worlds. The ERP of the future sits at an interesting triple intersection:

• Data Warehouse (The brain): Snowflake/Databricks style analytics
• Inventory Management (The physical world): Tracking SKUs, stock, and logistics
• Finance & Accounting (The ledger): Invoicing, procurement, and profitability

I have been on the front lines of the tension between these silos, and that’s why I was so excited to talk to Wiley from Doss. Doss’s "Closed Loop" connects these by ensuring every physical action has a corresponding financial and data footprint that is instantly queryable.

In this episode of In Practice, we talk about how Doss is building this future—and how, in addition to good ol’ fashioned systems engineering, this extremely gnarly morass is being radically accelerated by AI agents that can handle the heavy lifting of implementation.

Since a few years ago they’ve been running down the hard problems one would have to solve to cut this Gordian knot; if you’re hunting hard, valuable problems, go to Doss Jobs to learn what’s new on their list.

Check out my conversation with Wiley and stay tuned for more episodes of Theory’s In Practice.