Executive Summary

Kudu was built by flooring professionals for flooring professionals. While they originally attempted to white label another open source platform, the Kudu team realized they needed to build a proprietary ERP system to solve for the unique requirements of the flooring industry. Kudu turned to Dualboot Partners to design and build and end-to-end ERP system for the flooring industry.

About the Customer

KuduPro is a comprehensive ERP and business management suite designed specifically for flooring retailers. Their software streamlines operations, enhances productivity and empowers businesses with advanced features for sales, scheduling, inventory management and accounting.

Customer Challenge

The Kudu team originally attempted to use a customized open-source platform to power their business. However, they realized this system was not equipped to handle the needs of $100M+ annual run rate flooring companies. They turned to Dualboot and AWS to implement a system that was optimized for the flooring industry and that could achieve the level of scale that their customers demanded.

kudu platform

Why AWS?

The Kudu team chose AWS for several important reasons, a few of which I will highlight below:

  • Scalability: Kudu’s customers represent a wide range of business sizes — some of their largest customers process several hundred million dollars in transaction volume each year. It was important to the Kudu team that the solution be scalable. AWS offers the Kudu team scalability and flexibility, and in particular, the ECS service provides flexiblity in how the application is deployed as Kudu continues to scale.
  • Convenience: AWS is a one stop shop for the Kudu team. All of the services that the team needs to run their development organization are conveniently managed in the AWS console; everything from the deployment services, to file upload/storage, domain management, etc.
  • Visibility: Reporting is a critical function for any ERP system. The Kudu team investigated adding a proprietary reporting solution into the platform, and they also investigated integrating with an off-the-shelf BI provider. They were pleased to discover AWS QuickSight — with QuickSight, all users can meet varying analytic needs from the same source of truth through modern interactive dashboards, pixel-perfect reports, natural language queries and embedded analytics.

Why the Customer Chose the Partner

Dualboot has a proven track record of helping entrepreneurs like the Kudu team bring innovative new products to market. Dualboot’s approach has allowed Kudu to develop a robust ERP platform that can scale as they grow.

Partner Solution

Prior to working with Dualboot, the Kudu team had attempted to bring an open-source-based solution to market. However, they discovered that this solution was not flexible enough or scalable enough to build a company around. Dualboot worked with the Kudu team to at first design and then build an ERP application that would service the flooring industry.

  • AWS ECS for managing containerized app instances
  • AWS ALB for balancing incoming requests between app targets (ECS tasks)
  • AWS EC2 spot instances for CI/CD pipelines in Gitlab
  • AWS S3 for photo and document uploads
  • AWS RDS (PostgreSQL) as a main database + automatic snapshots
  • AWS ElastiCache (Redis) for caching and and message queuing
  • AWS CloudWatch as a base app monitoring/alerting tool and logs aggregator
  • AWS SSM as a parameter store
  • AWS QuickSight for data analysis
  • AWS Cloudfront – content delivery
  • AWS Route 53 – domain
  • AWS ACM – certificates for domains
  • AWS KMS – key management service, encryption/decryption
  • AWS Secrets – storing secrets
  • AWS IAM – Identity and Access Management
Kudu Mockup

Results and Benefits

Dualboot’s partnership empowered KuduPro to successfully launch a fully owned, modern ERP platform—unlocking operational efficiency, expanding revenue potential, and positioning them as a serious player in the industry.

Results
– Scalability for $100M+ retailers, enabling enterprise sales and deeper market penetration
– 4x faster order processing, cutting time from 10–20 minutes per order to under 5 minutes for multiple orders
– 10x faster inventory returns, reducing restocking and job closeout time from up to 24 hours to just 15–30 minutes
– Full IP ownership, allowing Kudu to invest in innovation, differentiate their offering, and control their product roadmap

Next Steps

The KuduPro team is working closely with Dualboot to complete the initial MVP launch of the KuduPro system. The Dualboot team is continuing to support the Kudu team by incorporating customer feedback into future iterations of the product.

“Dualboot worked with us like a true partner—helping us grow while bringing new ideas and expertise we didn’t know we needed.”

nick farrish

Nick Farrish
President, KuduPro

About the Partner

Dualboot Partners is a leading technology firm specializing in software development and business solutions. As an AWS Partner, they bring extensive expertise and industry knowledge to help businesses like Kudu achieve their goals and drive digital transformation.