In a recent appearance on FreightWaves' "The Stockout", Wiley discussed how brands are navigating the increasingly complex world of multi-channel operations, and how Doss helps companies streamline their physical operations.

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The Multi-Channel Challenge for Growing Brands

One of the most significant operational challenges facing brands today is managing the flow of products across multiple sales channels. As Wiley explained:

"The challenges we see always come in the form of when companies move from doing one of something to multiple of something. Beginning at the point of sale, you have multiple sales channels: you're selling into retail, into wholesale, direct to your end consumer over a Shopify website."

This complexity increases exponentially when brands need to:

• Consolidate data from various sales channels
• Maintain visibility across multiple inventory locations
• Coordinate production with first-party warehouses, 3PLs, and suppliers
• Connect demand forecasting with inventory management and production planning

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E-commerce to Retail

When asked about channel trends among Doss customers, Wiley highlighted a consistent pattern:

"The most interesting trend has been the sheer number of businesses that use e-commerce as a wedge to build their brand, but then a large amount of their volume comes through traditional retail as they grow past tens of millions in revenue."

What makes this particularly challenging is that each retail or wholesale partner operates differently:

"Each one has to be treated like its own unique channel as opposed to a subset of retail or wholesale, because each of these large trading partners can have completely different operational workflows."

This creates a situation where there's a massive amount of dollars on the other side for the brand but also "a large operational overhead" to manage these relationships properly.

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The Analytics Gap

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the biggest challenges brands face isn't advanced analytics, but simply establishing basic operational visibility:

"The bar for knowing what you're producing, what you have in inventory, and what you're selling is shockingly low. Just getting the correct answers on those things is actually quite hard, especially for brands that are quite fragmented in where they're producing things, where they're storing things, where they're selling things."

Once this foundation is established, brands can begin to automate reporting processes that typically require significant manual effort—weekly or monthly "sprints" to compile data that many supply chain professionals will recognize.

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Why You Need to Design Around Your Business, Not Your Software

The traditional ERP implementation playbook has remained largely unchanged for decades: buy expensive software, spend months (or years) customizing it, adapt your processes to match the software's capabilities, and hope the business benefits eventually outweigh the massive investment.

When asked how Doss differs from traditional ERPs, Wiley emphasized two key differentiators:

1. Business-First Design: "We focus on helping design a solution around what our customers' actual business is, as opposed to forcing them to design their business around what the greatest common denominator of our software is."
2. Rapid Implementation: "We're able to deliver a really bespoke, composable solution in a very quick window of time... reducing implementation time by 4 to 10x in terms of the amount of speed, time, and man-hours."

This approach is particularly valuable in today's rapidly changing business environment. As Wiley noted when discussing recent tariff changes and supply chain disruptions:

"The only answer to today's broad geopolitical economic problems is you have to just move faster."

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Who Benefits Most from This Approach?

Doss works with companies moving and selling physical products. We work with brands, their ingredient suppliers and the manufacturing companies that make finished goods (co-manufacturing, value-added services, etc).

"These brands are trying to find ways to get their product in front of more people, understand the costs and inputs to those individual sales, and make the operation from production to point of sale more efficient," Wiley explained.

Management teams at these companies are typically focused on product development, customer experience, and marketing—not the operational middle that ultimately determines their success. That's where Doss steps in to provide the operational foundation these brands need to scale.

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The Future: AI-Enhanced Operations

Looking ahead, Wiley sees artificial intelligence playing an increasing role in operations management:

"You can sprinkle a little AI on at the end of the day and it can do a lot of things that you couldn't do in the past related to forecasting and understanding things that are really hard for machine models to take in like seasonality and promotions."

As brands continue to navigate multi-channel complexity, this AI-enhanced approach to operations will become increasingly valuable—providing the agility needed to respond to today's rapidly changing business landscape.

Want to learn more about how Doss can help streamline your operations? Reach out to our team.

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