Most businesses don’t write custom software as their first initiative.
Often, businesses write software as a last resort to alleviate a workflow bottleneck caused by software that doesn’t integrate with how the business is run.
Writing custom software is an investment. To ensure you’re investing in the right area, you should understand where the pain points in your business are.
Is unnecessary manual effort being expended by employees? Do your workflows rely on employees to perform intermediary work between different software systems? Are employees constantly bending business processes to conform with the constraints of the software?
Determine what problems exist in your business, and you can identify which areas would benefit most from integration or software investment.
Sometimes the best course of action is to modify a process to conform with the constraints of other software.
Your Team Has Developed Too Many Workarounds
One warning sign is how many workarounds your employees have created.
For example, your sales team may use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to track sales opportunities, but may use an Excel spreadsheet to track sales opportunities that the CRM tool does not capture.
Some sales team members may use WhatsApp to conduct sales-related discussions, and use email to send sales quotes. They may use other work-related applications to generate and share reports.
If the employees of your company spend time each day transferring and/or manually entering data into various work-related applications, it may be an indication that your company has outgrown its current business applications.
If this sounds familiar, talk to Decimal Technologies about whether integration, automation or custom software could simplify the process.
Learn more about Decimal’s custom software development approach for workflows that off-the-shelf tools cannot support.
The Software You Use Does Not Align With Your Business Processes
Often, to adapt an off-the-shelf (readymade) software solution to your business, you will incur additional costs.
For your business to be successful, there should be a balance.
There are processes and procedures that are unique to your business. If the off-the-shelf software does not allow you to capture and integrate these processes in your business, then your employees may end up carrying out the processes in a manual and/or coordinated fashion.
The crucial question should be whether the software allows you to capture and integrate the critical processes in your business.
Your Employees Use Many Applications
It may appear that your business has the right software applications to meet your business needs.
The systems may not be able to communicate with each other.
A lead is captured through the website and later entered into CRM manually. The CRM information is then updated by the salesperson through several other systems.
Prior to opting for custom software development, understand if the systems integrate well.
It is likely that connecting your CRM, communication systems and business processes would reduce manual work.
In some cases, integration may solve the problem without replacing the systems your business already uses.
Reporting Depends on People Collecting Data
Management should not be in a situation where they spend a significant amount of time collecting data to understand business performance.
The management should be in a position to answer questions such as how many leads were generated, how many leads were qualified and converted to opportunities, which salesperson is responsible for each opportunity, and finally how many opportunities were closed and won.
The inability of the system to effectively answer such questions should make the management evaluate the need for a customized business solution.
Growth Can Make Existing Processes More Difficult
Although the business is positively impacted by growth, the process and people may not be able to effectively and efficiently adapt to the change.
A business that once employed 100 people may find its existing processes difficult to manage as the workforce grows to 1,000.
Processes that once supported employees effectively may begin to slow down, negatively affecting the growth of the business.
Software can be developed to account for numerous aspects of your business including core processes, roles, integrations, reporting and more. It can even be developed with future expansion in mind.
Just because a business expands, it doesn’t always mean that developing software internally is the best option. The core question is, can the existing software ecosystem efficiently and effectively support the expansion?
Is It Better to Develop or Buy Software?
Ultimately, the best course of action is context dependent.
Custom software may make sense when several systems are already being used, but they still cannot support an important business process without considerable manual work.
If an existing CRM, ERP or business application already meets the requirement, buying and integrating that solution may be more practical than building something from scratch.
The true cost of developing software is the total cost of ownership (TCO), which includes software development costs, maintenance, integrations and modifications.
Understanding the Business Need Before Identifying the Solution
At Decimal Technologies, we first work to understand your business needs before we start defining the software solution.
Once the needs are defined, a solution is designed and developed. Once the solution is validated, it is tested and deployed. Each solution is supported and maintained for the life of the customer-provider relationship.
There are different software and business needs. Sometimes, the best solution is developing a custom application. Other times, it may be integrating or automating existing business systems such as CRM, ERP, workflow tools or WhatsApp Business API.
For customer communication workflows, see Decimal’s WhatsApp Business Solution.
Our goal is to help businesses simplify their processes.
If your employees are spending too much time working around existing systems, talk to Decimal Technologies about whether custom software, integration or automation is the right next step.