As a business owner, harmonizing your company’s crucial needs with its long-term success is vital as well as challenging, particularly if you have just started your company. Difficult questions arise, for instance whether you should invest in long-term schemes or take the less expensive or short cut or more conservative approach. The ‘Buy or Build’ decision is vital and many enterprises face when addressing their software requirements.
Many businesses initially choose to invest in off-the-shelf software because they find it affordable and useful, but they eventually realized that the lack of customization in respect with their day-to-day operations finally result in to unproductive and disorganized manual processes. As they expand their business, these challenges become more and more complicated and scalability as well as business goals becomes harder to attain. Thereby, businesses are forced to invest heavily in custom software so that they can scale successfully.
Developing custom software can unlock loads of benefits, but companies should understand why they should invest in custom software development. Although, developing a custom software is costly affair but, the income on investment can be worth at the end. Keep in mind that lots of energy, time and resources must be devoted to custom development process. Custom software related tasks may primarily craft a perfect solution or smarter idea to make your business better, but there are many reasons to think again about it.
- Off-the-shelf software is inflexible: Most common off-the-shelf software will not allow you to alter or improve its functionality to make it more meaningful. In standard software, it may be difficult to add or remove in-built features, resulting into either too less or too many functions for your company and hence do not fulfill your objective.
- Off-the-shelf software is built for general purpose: It doesn’t suit your business need as it is made to address common needs of most of the companies. Every business is different and has specific needs, thus custom software may be better option to fulfill them.
- Off-the-shelf software may be incompatible with other software: Your Company might depend on different software (Software A & Software B) to complete different tasks. If these software don’t integrate with each other efficiently, they may obstruct your productivity. If you develop your own software, you can successfully complete your business operations.
Why should you think about using off-the-shelf software and not building your own software?
Custom software Development aids you to reap ample of benefits in your business. But, under some specific conditions, sticking with standard or off-the shelf solutions might be the more wise option. Especially, smaller businesses may benefit more by following this path after considering the following factors-
- Lack of technical expertise: Software development is long and complicated process. If you don’t have a software team equipped with the essential technical skills to develop custom software, it would be sensible to go for off-the shelf software.
- Smaller budget: The first and most logical reasons for business to not to choose custom software development is the costs. Off-the-shelf solutions are cheaper as compared to personalized software and therefore, it makes much more financial sense for a business with a limited budget.
- Lack of time: Developing personalized software involves a great deal of time to complete the process successfully. Businesses with time restriction should avoid the option to build custom software.
How can custom software aid scale your business?
In today’s competitive business world, it is important to stay strong among your rivals. You can do so by becoming active, adopting latest trends and not remaining static. So, if you foresee your business growing at a fast rate, there are lots of ways custom software development can aid making your business more scalable and dynamic.
- Competitive advantage: When you depend on the common off-the-shelf software which your rivals are also using, it will be quite difficult to perform better than them. By making your own software to perfectly suit your particular business operations, you can gain a competitive advantage over your rivals. The benefits increase as you invest more in your custom-made solutions.
- Better productivity: software that is purposely tailored with your specific needs in mind can aid your employees to work smarter and faster. You can build an inclusive technology system as opposed to using different software. An integrated solution can help in gaining great productivity as all the data is kept at one place and users can access the data easily as they don’t have to switch between different websites to complete their job.
- Faster response time: In order to develop effective custom software, you need to hire expert software developers. Once the development team is in action, they can build a variety of tools and solutions. As your business requires change or as you expand your business, the team can immediately modify the software to match current business needs.