Supply chain software builders: *Don't* try to change your user's behavior.
The next bem primitive is the Router. Get closer to your users. Remove change management from the equation.
Years ago, a boss of mine resisted calling our product a 'tool.' But tools are the bedrock of progress—they power industries and shape our world. Software, in particular, is a tool of tools, capable of creating complex systems and solutions. Imagine a hammer that can build more hammers.
The problem: most of the software sucks. I’ve spent most of my life as a software engineer fighting the business requirements, swimming upstream, and trying to get as close as I can to the user requirements. It took me years of pain to realize that the goal is never the software. Software always has to be subservient to the business requirements and to the user executing them.
There’s no ill intention here. Building complex software is incredibly hard. The most complex product I’ve ever built is Silo. I take enormous pride in having built a tool that people on their feet all night can use to sell more food, move faster, and go home to their families sooner. But like many other tools, what started as a simple, easy-to-use platform, ended up being a complex software product that required training and adaptation.
Mistakes were made. I’m a big fan of building products incrementally but pressing the reset button to re-accommodate the platform every so often. However modular your software product is, you’re always going to carry product debt.
99% of communication happening off-platform
In supply chain management, 99% of crucial communication happens outside of platforms—in emails, PDFs, and other unstructured formats. This chaotic environment leads to inefficiencies, with humans often doing the work that software should handle.
From first principles, all these emails, PDFs, orders, requests, people asking for things, people returning things, invoices, have to be entered into the system. If the software won’t do it for you, then a human will have to do it. This is expensive for both the ERP user and software vendor.
I realize every day, more than ever, that until now, we simply didn’t have the tools to build a good ERP. Deterministic software abstractions can only get you thus far. The root problem is in our obsession with building software that kind of gets close to the user but not really.
Truly excellent software bends the knee for the user.
The next 10 years of bem will be obsessive about one principle: giving you the primitives that allow you to build software that bends the knee for the user.
Our next primitive: the Router
In line with our commitment to building software that truly serves the user, we're excited to introduce our latest innovation: the bem Router.
We first built you a way to seamlessly transform unstructured data. Every day we learn more and more from our users, who’ve already transformed millions of data points with bem. One of the first challenges we get is: well, I don’t know what the data is before I send it to you. The situation is that chaotic. We’ve been there.
The bem Router is a cutting-edge data classifier and transformer designed to streamline data management for businesses. With bem's Router, you can now channel all your incoming data—whether invoices, orders, integration data, or conversations—through a single, automated entry point.
We couldn’t be more excited. For one, this is true value for our users today. On a personal note, this gets us closer and closer to our vision as a company. We believe in actions and results, so we’ll talk more about our vision in the future.
We invite you to experience the bem Router for yourself. Your feedback will help us continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in data management.
We can’t wait to see what you’ll build with bem.