Do you buy software at least once a year to cater to the ever-growing needs of your business?
Off-the-shelf software is a great choice for small startups. However, as your company grows, it develops a software addiction. Meaning, you have to buy more and more to satisfy its needs. As a result, your employees struggle with multiple programs, deal with repetitive data entry, battle high learning curves, and waste time.
A simple way out is to develop custom software.
Since the price tag for custom programs is formidable while the development time is considerable, you have to be 100% sure that you are making the right decision.
In this article, we’ll go over the benefits of developing custom software to help understand if the time has come to make an investment.
1. Business Process Optimization
With multiple off-the-shelf software, it’s hard to optimize your business process substantially. You have to keep considering the repetitive actions needed to work with different programs. Meanwhile, your employees are busy with work, which can be done by another program.
Overall, when you work with several programs, you are constantly held back by their inability to collaborate properly. Thus, business process optimization suffers.
Custom software cuts the unnecessary actions taken by employees to a minimum. It aligns with your business model and follows the company’s unique in-house processes.
Imagine solving a complex equation with a calculator. You have one calculator doing additions and subtractions. The other calculator does multiplication while the third one deals with division. How long will it take you to solve 12×3-6/2+5? Now how long will it take you to do it with a regular calculator?
2. Infinite Flexibility
Off-the-shelf programs are designed to deal with a certain number of tasks. When the company’s needs go beyond what the program can do, the business has to invest in a new program. As a result, the number of programs used by the company grows, making it tougher to optimize the business process.
Custom-developed software can be designed with utter flexibility. It can accommodate the growing needs of a company. Developers leave the software “open” to additions so you don’t have to worry about creating a new program to cater to new needs.
As the company changes so does the software. However, employees don’t need to spend time learning how to use new programs thus avoiding downtime and delays.
3. Remote Collaboration
These days, it’s hard to find a business that doesn’t require employees to access software from remote locations. Many companies need remote collaboration for work process optimization and better customer service.
Accessing several different programs from a mobile device can be complicated and time-consuming. That’s why remote collaboration is usually tough for a large company without custom software.
Not all off-the-shelf programs allow access to information from mobile devices or of the network. Those that do may not be optimized for accommodating several employees at once.
According to developers from Entrance Consulting, custom-developed software simplifies remote access to the joint projects, thus improving the efficiency of the work process.
4. Saved Time
One of the major benefits offered by custom developed software is time. It can help your company save time (which, as you know, is money) in several different ways:
Reduce the time spent by employees on executing repetitive tasks, such as data entering into different programs.
Allow faster data gathering, analysis, and storage.
Simplify remote collaboration between different teams.
Eliminate the learning curve of each new off-the-shelf program purchased by the company and much more.
When the company starts working with custom software, the time spent on unnecessary routine actions reduces considerably.
For example, let’s consider a doctor’s office. When processing a patient’s information, the data has to be entered into several programs, from medical history sheet to insurance compensation request.
The employee proceeds to type name, last name, social security number, address, etc. over and over again. If it takes a minute for each program, the time spent on each patient is three minutes. Now, let’s multiply it by the number of patients. How much time are your employees wasting?
5. Competitive Edge
Since custom software can help you save time and money while optimizing the business process, it allows you to gain a competitive edge over other businesses. A company using custom software can achieve much better results than the same company, which uses off-the-shelf programs.
While your competitors are wasting time on repetitive actions or on learning how to use a new program, your employees are working on immediate projects and dealing with important challenges.
If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you have to use the sharpest tools to do it. Custom-developed software is one of those tools. Meanwhile, it makes your company unique and more appealing to the target audience.
6. Save Money
Even though the initial software development costs may appear high, the overall ROI of custom software development is impressive. You can improve your overall input, thus increasing sales and profits.
The basic ROI calculation involves using the following equation (Reduced cost + Increased revenue) / Project cost = ROI.
Custom software can also help you save money on purchasing new programs every time your business needs a change. You can also save on maintenance and support.
Custom develop software reduces the number of human errors made when entering data into different programs. As a result, Fewer analytics and processing errors are made, thus reducing the amount of money spent on their rectification.
7. Higher Customer Satisfaction
When you work with custom software, the overall speed and efficiency of your work processes increase. As a result, you can offer higher customer satisfaction. In the world of fierce competition, which is the reality for many industries today, you have to come out on top.
Any delays caused by your software reflect on your ability to satisfy your clients. Since custom-developed software caters to the needs of your company, you can divert your attention from making multiple off-the-shelf programs work properly and focus on improving customer satisfaction.
8. Worry-Free Maintenance and Support
Off-the-shelf programs often come with poor support options. High-quality maintenance support costs formidable amounts of money. When you have several programs, servicing all of them properly may be costly.
Meanwhile, off-the-shelf program developers may not be ready to support their programs for years to come. They may come up with new products and decide to stop the support for old ones altogether.
When it comes to custom-developed software, you get high-quality lifetime support and maintenance for your program.
9. Exclusivity
Off-the-shelf programs are designed to cater to numerous businesses. That’s why they usually have a wide variety of features. One given business may benefit from half of them. The rest will be standing in the way and interfering with the work process.
This variety of features can also make the implementation and learning more complicated thus wasting time and money.
Custom-developed software is designed exclusively for your company without any extra features, which you may never need.
Conclusion:
All businesses need custom software development. Custom-developed software can help you save time and money, optimize all business processes, achieve better customer satisfaction, enjoy worry-free support, and gain a competitive edge.
The numerous benefits of such software are hard to underestimate. The only downside is the high initial costs. However, the impressive ROI of such software should help business owners overlook the inconvenience.
