The last 10 years have seen an immense growth in demand for custom software by businesses. Custom software development seeks to fulfill very specific organizational needs that off-the-shelf software cannot solve. Between 2019 and 2024 alone, the market will have grown by $27 billion. This will represent a compound annual growth rate of 6.7%.
Custom software development can resolve a myriad of specific operational problems within any business, from supply chain glitches, administrative inefficiencies to a lack of analytics for business insights. Here are 5 problems you could resolve.
Lack of Staff Productivity
Your business may wish to increase the productivity of staff, but it could struggle due to a lack of automation. Human resources must be coupled with the right tools to help with repetitive manual tasks. Reducing manual tasks for staff members in organizations is a common reason for developing custom software. Whether it’s data entry or invoice handling, you will get more out of your staff through tailor-made software.
Work orders are also likely to take a shorter time to complement, which will massively improve customer satisfaction. The number of errors associated with manual work will also reduce significantly. In the long run, the investment in custom software will pale in comparison to savings made by having fewer people employed to handle repetitive tasks.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed to managers how vulnerable businesses can be to contingencies that force the closure of offices. Custom software that supports remote working can ensure that your staff remains productive even when they are away from the office. Unprepared businesses would be forced to either lay off people or keep them on the payroll while they are not being productive.
Custom Software Cures Recurring Operational Problems
It’s common for a growing business to face recurring problems with each new client. Lost contact information missed appointments and deadlines, inefficient allocation of duties among staff members, and so forth. Custom software can help organize the workflow better and iron out bottlenecks. The organization will be a better place to scale with fewer mistakes. In fact, investors who want to help a business scale will often inquire about the capacity of the internal processes to handle the additional requirements that come with scaling. Software built to support internal functions will make a strong case about such capacity.
Inefficient Data Handling
If your business is still reliant on spreadsheets, your staff may be spending 80% of their time collecting, analyzing, and reporting on data. This can be whittled down significantly while also getting better insights into your business.
Custom software that helps efficiently collect, organize, analyze, and draw insights faster and sometimes in real-time depending on the nature of business. This approach makes your data a great asset because you will be able to spot anomalies and trends early enough. With enough time and the right algorithms, predictive analytics becomes a reality, where you can make decisions such as production and stocking based on predictions on demand. Predictive analytics also helps to model different scenarios to aid decisions such as pricing, staffing, new product introduction, and so forth.
Really, better handling of data helps your managers to make informed decisions more confidently. With simplified dashboards, even non-technical staff can make queries and generate and share reports.
Poor Customer Relations
A growing business faces the challenge of maintaining healthy relationships with customers. Nowadays customer relations has very many faces due to numerous channels of engagement available. You need to keep an eye on social media, emails, customer care lines, and so forth. It can be really overwhelming when you don’t have enough resources to hire enough staff members to keep everything in check.
Custom software can help integrate email messaging and social media engagement tools. The software should also have a dashboard from where you can check on the progress of customers’ job orders so you can answer their questions on progress. Without a proper system, you will always be running frantically whenever a certain piece of information is sough.
Poor Integration of Systems
Sometimes businesses may be relying on several independent systems to fulfill their operations. Such systems probably cannot communicate, forcing the manual and tedious transfer of data. By building new custom software, it may be possible to use APIs other solutions to integrate previously independent systems. The manual transfer of data will cease together with the common errors and lack of timeliness.
Other Benefits of Custom Software
Custom software is a great capital investment for any organization. It is likely to support operations for at least a couple of years before major upgrades are due. Even then, the developer can adjust support any new functionalities that may be necessary. Custom software can also be a source of competitive advantage especially when it enables faster delivery of service to customers as well as standardized and consistent quality of work.
As highlighted earlier, more efficient processes can result in significant cost savings for businesses. The availability of data can lead to insights that help with reducing resource waste.
Security and reliability are other crucial benefits of building custom software. Depending on the nature of data being handled, custom software can be built with the robustness to withstand any threats. Custom software also takes into consideration the rights of various users and roles, access rights, and controls are put in place.
Building Custom Software for Your Business
Custom software is always a significant investment for any business. Getting the right development team is always crucial. They must understand the organizational workflow and the specific problems the software should resolve. If the organization has other systems it currently uses, the question of replacement or integration must be understand. The development team should remain onboard even after delivering the software to help with training and resolving any issues that could arise in implementation.
If your organization needs assistance developing custom software, check out Transcendent Software. We are a full-fledged IT services company with over 20 years of experience in helping clients develop, launch, and use custom-made software to support their operations.