At some point, almost every growing company faces the same question about their supply chain technology: do we buy a system, or do we build something ourselves?
Almost every time, the conversation goes the same way. Someone on the engineering team thinks they can build it. Someone on the operations team has been burned by a bad software purchase before. The CEO wants to move fast. The CFO wants to keep costs down.
There’s no universally right answer, but there are a few things that almost always point in one direction.
The honest case for buying
Supply chain software — WMS, TMS, ERP — exists because fulfillment, inventory, and logistics are hard problems that a lot of companies have already solved. When you buy a system, you’re buying the solution to those problems plus the ongoing investment of a dedicated product team keeping it current.
The honest case for buying is: your engineering team’s time is almost always worth more spent on your core product than on building a warehouse management system. Even if you have the talent to build it, is that the best use of it?
Buy when: your needs are relatively standard, you want to move fast, and you don’t want to become a software company inside a supply chain company.
The honest case for building
Some operations genuinely have requirements that off-the-shelf software can’t handle. Custom workflows, specific integrations, unusual data structures, or a level of flexibility that no vendor can match.
More often, though, I see companies default to building because buying feels expensive, or because the demos they saw didn’t quite fit. Before you start building, push hard on whether an existing system could get you 80–90% of the way there. In supply chain, 80–90% is usually good enough to start.
Build when: you’ve genuinely exhausted the market and your requirements are unique enough that no existing product can serve them.
The option nobody talks about enough
There’s a middle path that I see work really well for early and growth-stage companies: start with something simple (yes, even a spreadsheet), build the discipline and the data, and then make the buy-or-build decision with real information about what you actually need.
I’ve helped companies run multi-million-dollar distribution operations on well-structured Google Sheets. Not because it’s the ideal long-term solution — but because it worked, it was cheap, everyone understood it, and it gave them 18 months of data to inform what they actually needed to buy or build next.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the operational.
The question I always ask first
Before buy vs. build, I ask: what problem are you actually trying to solve right now?
Sometimes the answer is “we don’t have real-time inventory visibility.” Sometimes it’s “orders are getting picked wrong too often.” Sometimes it’s “we can’t see where our shipments are.”
Each of those problems has a different solution. And sometimes the solution isn’t a new system at all — it’s a process change, or a better use of a system you already have. Start with the problem. The technology decision follows from there.
Mina Hanna is the founder of KD Hanna, a supply chain consulting firm helping startups and growing businesses build resilient operations. Get in touch →