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In today’s highly competitive landscape, developing custom software that enables companies to work faster, smarter, and without friction is of crucial importance.
Even though we now have an endless supply of great pre-built solutions to choose from for literally every obstacle we could potentially face as a business on our road to success, it’s not often easy to pick the ones that cover everything that you need.
That is because “off-the-shelf” solutions come with its limitations. Companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Google focus on overlapping needs of their customers’ needs instead of outlier cases that don’t repeat often. Their solutions have proven to be useful for millions of business customers across the globe. They look to find the common ground between all customers and serve as many businesses as they can.
In reality, one size doesn’t fit all, which is why many companies are forced to take matters into their own hands and build custom solutions that perfectly fit their situations.
It's important to be extremely critical and realistic when deciding if a pre-built tool can fill your business specific needs or not and are those business needs “important enough” for you to invest money into building custom software.
That of course has to be decided on a case-to-case basis. We at Share IT have been in this software development for a long time now and we have helped a great number of businesses develop custom solutions that have significantly improved their internal and external quality of work across all sectors.
During just these last two years, we have worked with customers of all shapes and sizes. Companies both big and small have reached out to us to help them build custom solutions for their businesses. Some customers we advised to immediately double-down their investment in custom software and improve additional areas of their business as well, others we advised to pivot their strategy and opt for the cheaper solution, i.e. get an already existing tool that has the capabilities to meet their business needs.
What matters most in this decision making phase is education and perspective. Before developing a customized software solution, you need to identify the exact requirements, and then calculate the development cost associated with the size and complexity of the project.
This is an extremely important step and that is why we always advise our customers to first invest in proper IT consulting before they green light the project.
We wrote more about this in one of our previous articles. If you haven’t already read our How to Make Sure You’re Building the Right App for Your Business, now is the time to do so.
Looking back at the projects we did for our customers, most of the business needs fall into three main categories with common goals:
Depending on the stage in which your company is at the moment and your position within your market, you’re going to prioritize one over the other. All the custom solutions that fall under these buckets will make a positive impact on your overall business because they will directly solve problems that are unique to your situation. The trick is to figure out which one you need immediate need for and which ones are for later stages of your growth.
Allow us to explain: if, for instance, your business struggles with internal comms and onboarding new personnel at a high clip, then you probably need to prioritize the creation of employer-facing solutions that streamline internal processes over everything else. If you’re struggling to properly convert customers and reduce churn rates, you probably need to build customer-facing software solutions that elevate the end user’s experience to the next level.
Regardless of the type of solution you decide to build, all of them come with different perks. Just for perspective and inspiration, here are some examples of important business activities that you can upgrade with the creation of custom software:
1. Improve Internal Information Flow, Storage, and Accessibility
This falls under the first group (employer-facing solutions that streamline internal processes). Internal communication, data storage, and information flow is usually time consuming and implies labor intensive tasks. Even though products like Slack and Microsoft Teams have done a great job filling up basic needs, most businesses still struggle to set up their information systems in a way that feels natural for them.
That’s why they invest in the creation of custom intranet sites that help them with organizing and storing information, generating custom analytics, and tracking projects.
Depending on the company needs and structure, a team or department can use a company intranet to share relevant documents, articles, charts, etc. In this day and age where remote work has become the norm, most companies invest in intranet sites that help with new employee onboarding and education. They build internal wikis that make all the key information and training materials available to everyone that needs them.
And that’s probably the biggest upside in investing in such a solution. Accessibility is an extremely important factor in today’s climate. An intranet connects all employees from multiple locations and gives them a chance to collaborate on various documents and projects. It easily allows workers in satellite offices and those who work from home to stay up to date on company news and events.
2. Automate Mundane, Time-Consuming Work That Frustrates Your Customers and Employees Alike
In order to rise over the competition and hit your business goals regularly, you need to find ways to improve business efficiencies and reduce operational costs. Investing in the creation of custom software is probably the best way to do that, especially if cloud technology is the part of the solution.
Building solutions that will help your employees save a lot of time on doing manual and repetitive work will immediately make a noticeable impact. For instance, things like sales and marketing reports tend to eat a lot of time if the data is being connected and analyzed manually.
Reporting is essential for any business from any industry. Data speaks everything. Instead of spending hours digging your way through excel sheets and doc files, your customized business solution can give you a summarized report from where you can retrieve all the necessary inputs and use them effectively to achieve business goals.
You can cut this activity down from hours to minutes if you invest in the creation of the right solution. SharePoint is a great option as it enables users to visualize data in a dashboard and get a nice top-view of all the vital business stats. Custom solutions will remove a lot of busy time from your team’s schedule that you can then easily allocate to other important work.
3. Save Money in the Long Run and Scale
Even though cost is always a factor when it comes to investing into the creation of custom software vs. opting in for an off-the-shelf solution, most people don’t really understand that building your own thing usually pays off in the long run. But that’s only if you do a thorough business and TCO analysis at the beginning. Setting the foundation is 80% of the work and you need the right software development partner to do that.
As you grow, business operations become bigger and more complex. You need to build and implement custom workflows that support your growth and help you work smarter instead of harder. With custom software, that is not a super difficult thing to do. You can scale pretty easily on a system that you have designed and figure out how to upgrade it to meet your new needs.
With off-the-shelf software, things are not as simple. Why, you ask? Well, it’s because you’re adjusting your procedures and working style to the software while it should be the other way around. To shake the status quo and get more of the paid software as is, you’d probably need to invest in additional subscriptions or licensing for other features. And even then, they might not be a good fit for you. With custom software solutions, you have the flexibility to move in the direction that’s right for your business alone.
It’s hard to predict when you will see your investment in custom software will start to pay off, but you don’t have to do the math on your own. As we wrote above, the key to building custom software lies in the prep work. IT consulting is an investment you won’t regret and it’s actually a vital part of risk management.
If you think there’s room to improve the way your business functions internally and you trust the right technology could be the answer, no need to wander in the dark. Schedule an exploratory meeting with Share IT to see if our experts can help you out.
