Success in business is often determined by what a company does differently to the competition. By being more efficient, more flexible, more able to meet your customer's needs, you will beat your competitors.
The software you run can play a key part in differentiating your business. You could settle for an off-the-shelf system that approximates what you need. That does most of what you want it to do, as long as you do things a certain way.
But why settle for software that's almost right, when you could just as easily have software that's exactly right. Software that is designed solely to run your business as you intended. So there's no need to cut corners, duplicate effort, or convert formats. You gain efficiency, while keeping things simple - you get everything you do need, and nothing that you don't. If you want a big red button and a little green one, you can have it - it's your software.
RAD - It Means "Quicker than you'd think"
Actually it means Rapid Application Development, but what we mean is we can design and build applications quickly - simple ones (take some data, do something with it) can be as little as a couple of days and even complex ones (take lots of different sorts of data, change it, show it to lots of people, store it, export it to other systems) will only be a couple of months. This is possible because:
- We use the best development tools available, with the most robust programming languages - a lot of the basics are done for us by the tools so we can get on with the clever stuff.
- We use building blocks - core functionality common to many applications that can be quickly adapted to suit the application in hand.
- Our developers aren't just geeks. They also understand business, what it takes to make money and not be bothered by IT. They won't be putting a load of extra buttons on "to make it look like the Starship Enterprise"!
- We're very good at what we do. In development good=quick.
When you consider how long it would take to adapt an existing application (or set of applications), adapt them as far as possible to make them work the way you need, and train staff just how to do that, it's definitely worth investigating. Because while off-the-shelf may be cheaper to begin with, the long term costs of lost productivity are harder to justify.
Do I Need This?
Computer software is a productivity tool. It's supposed to reduce or eliminate the workload of a person, through automation of a process. So the test for whether your business needs custom software is simple:
- Identify individual processes in your business (e.g. "receive order from customer")
- Identify the steps needed to perform that process on a computer (e.g. "enter data on accounts system")
- Ask "Can any of those steps be automated?".
It's then a case of assessing how to automate a process, and whether that will save time/money. In the above example, if entering a order takes on average 5 minutes, and you get three orders a day, spending a few thousand pounds on an automated order entry system probably isn't the way to go. But if you get 10,000 orders a day, and you can move the order-entry team into customer service by having that same system, then it definitely is.
Next Steps
Of course, the example above was a fairly simple one. It can be difficult to identify where processes can be automated, particularly when you're the manager/owner of a business. It is often far easier for us (as business process consultants) talking to people on the shop floor to spot where things can be done better. It's not that we'd pretend to know your business better than you do - far from it - it's just we come in with a fresh perspective, looking for particular indicators. Sometimes we can spot better ways of using existing systems - simple things that we've learned elsewhere that we're happy to pass on. So step one is just to get us in for a day to have a chat and see how you do things. From there, we'll see where and how you can work smarter using your current software, whether we can adapt/extend your current software to work better, and of course if custom software is the way to go.
To arrange a meeting with one of our business process consultants, call us today.