Insight
Your business is not unusual. Your constraint is.
Almost every business believes its operations are too particular for a ready product. The operations usually rhyme. What differs is which single thing is binding.
1 min read
The claim everyone makes
Nearly every business says the same thing early in a conversation: our operations are unusual, standard software will not fit.
It is worth taking seriously, and it is usually wrong. A jeweller, a hardware shop and a sports retailer all buy stock, hold it, sell it, take money and owe tax. At the level of what has to be recorded they are remarkably similar businesses.
What actually differs
The constraint. The single thing that, if it goes wrong, damages the business more than anything else.
| Business | The binding constraint |
|---|---|
| Clothing retailer | Size and colour. Everything else is ordinary retail. |
| Hardware shop | Trade credit exposure, which is lending under another name. |
| Electronics retailer | Unit identity, because warranty depends on a serial. |
| Salon | Perishable time. An empty chair-hour is unrecoverable. |
| Law firm | Dates, where an error is professional liability. |
| Pharma manufacturer | Batch traceability, because a recall boundary decides the cost. |
Read that column and the differences are real but narrow. The rest of each business is ordinary, and ordinary is what products are good at.
Which is why we organise the way we do
This is the reason there are seventy-two industry pages behind two products rather than seventy-two products. The industry page exists to name the constraint and show it is understood. The product handles the ordinary parts, which are most of the work.
A business whose constraint genuinely is not handled should not buy the product, and we would rather say so than configure around a mismatch. That case exists. It is just rarer than the number of businesses who believe they are it.
Questions about anything here, or a situation this does not cover? contact@anantatechhub.com