Dogscan GmbH cut its test data processing time from two hours down to five minutes, digitized its HR and training records, and built a fully custom ERP system without hiring a single outside developer. That's the short version. The German health startup, which trains dogs to detect lung cancer through breath analysis, hit the ground running with Ninox and never looked back.
Dogscan's method is one of a kind. Specially trained dogs analyze breath samples and pick up on cancer cells at the earliest stages, long before most other detection methods would catch anything. Customers, both individuals and a growing number of corporate clients, receive a breath test kit by mail, wear a mask for five minutes, and send it back for analysis by the Dogscan team and its five working dogs. With a team of nine people, the company had a big job ahead of it: building every process and system from scratch, with no existing software and no established workflows to lean on.
Founder Alexander Maßen set the bar high. He wanted a system that covered every part of the business, offered serious automation potential, and gave him the flexibility to build new features himself, without waiting on external vendors for every little change. After comparing platforms, including FileMaker, Dogscan chose Ninox for being more intuitive, more mobile friendly, and a better fit for a startup budget. The learning curve for scripting took a bit of getting used to at first, but once the team got their feet wet, they were building custom functions on their own in no time.
Ninox is now the backbone of nearly everything Dogscan does. Customer data, including order details and barcode scanned return cards, used to take up to two hours to process by hand. Now it takes five minutes. Test results get generated as PDFs automatically and emailed straight to the person who took the test, no manual steps required.
Precision in training, simplicity in documentation
The training side of the business runs on Ninox too, and here the stakes are especially high. Every dog goes through a rigorous, systematic training program, with all records logged automatically. A randomization system decides which masks, real test samples and decoys alike, go into which slot on the search board, and neither the dog nor its handler knows the layout in advance. Each customer sample gets checked independently by at least five dogs, and only the person building the setup knows where anything is placed, never the handlers. That separation keeps the process honest and the results clean. Dogscan even runs an ongoing performance study based on real customer orders, and Ninox makes that data easy to track and easy to trust for anyone reviewing quality internally or externally.
As Alexander Maßen, the Managing Director of Dogscan, sums it up:
Ninox put us in a position to build an ERP system tailored exactly to our needs, without a lot of heavy lifting.
HR and data protection, made digital
HR runs through Ninox as well. Employees clock their hours and breaks straight from a calendar view, whether they're in the office or out in the field, and the company meets its legal time tracking obligations without breaking a sweat. As Franziska Schumacher put it, our HR solution in Ninox is the ideal setup for a company without a dedicated HR department: simple, secure, and flexible. Time tracking used to mean wrestling with clunky Excel sheets. Now that headache is a thing of the past.
Data privacy was baked in from the start, and for good reason. Dogscan handles sensitive health information every day, so only the person taking the test receives the kit and the results, regardless of who placed the order. Every step of data handling and result delivery runs through secure, vetted processes inside Ninox, keeping confidentiality airtight throughout.
The payoff has been hard to miss. Data entry time dropped from two or three hours to five minutes. Training documentation now saves the team thirty to forty five minutes per session. And HR processes are one hundred percent digital and GDPR compliant, with no gaps left to paper over.
Let's figure it out together.
