Building a Scalable, Industry-Specific ERP on AWS for the Flooring Market

Kudu partnered with Dualboot and AWS to replace a constrained open-source platform with a fully owned, enterprise-grade ERP.

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.

The Opportunity

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.

Why AWS?

The Kudu team chose AWS for several important reasons, a few of which we 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.

The 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

“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

President

The Impact

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.

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.