There are several advantages of custom software in comparison to off-the-shelf software. After all, designing and developing software tailored to meet your specific business requirements leads to a superior technological solution that accommodates the unique aspects and nuances of your business.
Although off-the-shelf software has some benefits like lower cost and ready-to-use, it cannot match the string of crucial advantages offered by custom software. In a way, it’s even unfair to expect off-the-shelf software that has been developed for the mass market to fulfill requirements and resolve issues that are specific to your organization.
What makes custom software development special? And why should it matter to businesses? Custom software development focuses solely on understanding and accommodating the client’s business model and requirements, unlike off-the-shelf software. The iterative software development process takes into account the unique business process and makes provisions for the challenges, unforeseen problems, and risks that your business may be vulnerable to.
While custom software development services are undoubtedly expensive, the multi-faceted benefits of tailored software solutions more than compensate for the expended time, effort, and money. Here we examine a few ways in which custom software smooths technical glitches and miscues, driving value in your enterprise.
How Custom Software Smooths Glitches & Miscues
Although custom software takes time and effort (depending upon the nature and size of your business) to develop, it’s definitely worth the effort in the long run. You can have more oversight and control in the development process, so the final product can be exactly what you want it to be, do exactly what you want it to do, and look exactly how you want it to.
Another advantage of custom software is that it can integrate with your company’s other software and add features and functionality that are integral to your business. At the same time, you don’t pay for features that you may never use. Moreover, custom software projects are geared towards finding technological and automated solutions to even the most challenging tasks that are unique to your business, minimizing the occurrence of challenges and issues.
Here’s how tailored software can help minimize risks, issues, complications, and challenges to help your organization run at its optimal efficiency.
1. Optimizes and Streamlines Business Workflow
The challenge with off-the-shelf software is that businesses need to adapt their business processes in line with it. Introducing non-value added changes like adding extra steps and redundancies in your business process may lead to errors and delays.
One of the major advantages of custom software is that it eliminates the possibility of errors and technical issues by optimizing and automating your in-house tasks wherever possible. In fact, at the beginning of the custom software development process, the team tries to gather an understanding of the process workflows to develop automated tasks.
When software aligns with an organization’s unique business model and meets the exact requirements of its processes, it helps improve the organizational efficiency and accuracy by helping teams complete tasks better and faster. But that’s not all. Custom software solutions can even be designed to optimize work processes involving third parties and even place stringent quality controls to ensure compliance with company benchmarks.
2. Enables Compatibility
A primary advantage of custom software is that it can be designed to be compatible with your existing systems, software, programs, and applications. Compatibility with other software eliminates the need for employees to switch from one program or one application to another, helping create an uninterrupted and smooth flow between programs and processes. This helps increase employee productivity and minimizes errors.
In most cases, technical glitches arise when two or more software or platforms are not compatible with each other. A single glitch in any task of your business process can lead to errors and stalling of operations. This is because business processes are typically comprised of a series of sequential tasks. The output of one task may serve as the input for the next consecutive task and any compatibility issue at any point or link in the business process may cause downtime. One of the new benefits of custom software is that its customized environment allows greater interoperability between processes and systems, reducing the probability of technical issues.
3. Provides Safety and Security
Security is a prime requirement for business software with the ever-increasing need to protect consumer data from external threats in the modern digital era. Standard software is inherent with security concerns and risks especially when it comes to sensitive business, financial, and personal data.
When malicious actors manage to gain entry into an enterprise’s system and access data, it has to spend excessive time, effort, and resources in trying to recover from the attack and make the system fool-proof and secure. This can lead to downtime, delays, and even errors in the existing business systems and processes. Therefore, security lapses prove to be extremely expensive.
In contrast, custom software is highly secure as hackers are not familiar with the loopholes or vulnerabilities of your customized application. In addition, it minimizes security risks as it can be fitted with the right data security protocol that meets your business’s standard security requirements and procedures. Companies are responsible for ensuring data protection and are held accountable for any data loss or breaches. Hence, this is a significant advantage of custom software and is alone sufficient for companies to consider creating tailored software solutions.
4. Is More Adaptable
Off-the-shelf software is not adaptable to continuously evolving business requirements. In the event that a change is required, off-the-shelf software may need additional steps or workarounds to accommodate the change. This also applies to scalability issues in times of expansion or migration. Non-adaptability can lead to serious downtime as standard software cannot handle changes or large amounts of data.
At such times, errors and delays in processing transactions can lead to significant business losses. On the other hand, custom software is highly adaptable to the changing needs of businesses. One of the crucial advantages of custom-built software is that it can accommodate changes and updates as per the unique requirements of your organization. Furthermore, it can adapt to the increasing scope and business demands, minimizing technical glitches that are typically experienced during periods of expansion or transition.
5. Resolves Integration Issues
Off-the-shelf software has restricted integration options with other systems and platforms that prevent an uninterrupted workflow and may even lead to redundancies in data and processes. In stark contrast, custom software has the advantage of flexible integration – it can be tailored to integrate with multiple systems and software, eliminating the possibility of incompatibilities.
Given the huge number of applications for different tasks, businesses adopt new programs and apps on the fly, which can be quite challenging to maintain with off-the-shelf software. Hence, they require custom software with flexible integration capabilities for seamless business operations. Flexible integration can help companies save significant resources by eliminating the need to overcome incompatibility issues and even inaccuracies in data exchange, reporting, and analytics that may lead to ill-informed business decisions.
With rapid advances in technology, businesses need to be ever more flexible now in terms of integration with newer systems, programs, and updates.
6. Provides Reliable Support & Maintenance
A paramount advantage of custom software is that any feature improvements or modifications can be added as and when required. In addition, there is no risk of custom software being discontinued, unlike off-the-shelf software which may require last-minute scrambling for a replacement software solution that calls for subsequent adoption and adaptability changes. Custom software can be maintained as long as the business that is using it is still in operation.
Moreover, custom software development companies offer reliable technical support and maintenance plan to manage technical glitches and improvements like updates and upgrades. The support plan includes a structured and streamlined approach to tackling bugs and issues and that too within short response and turnaround times.
With custom software, an experienced technical support team that has specialized knowledge of your business process and application is available to tackle problems, presenting effective solutions along the way. Support teams that are familiar with the unique aspects of your business can provide better and faster resolutions to problems and bugs. This, in turn, helps businesses realize their goals in a timely manner by eliminating downtime and delays.
As can be seen from the above-mentioned points, the numerous advantages of custom software can have positive implications for businesses in the long run. However, one of the common concerns of businesses is the time and effort required to closely collaborate with custom software development teams to help them gain a better understanding of their business model and requirements. In addition, the development process may last for several months and cost a decent amount of money.
Nonetheless, the competitive advantage provided by custom software helps businesses streamline workflows and scale. It’s safe to say that custom software is a primary need for enterprises in today’s dynamic digital economy.
If you’re looking to build custom software for your business, Bitbean is an innovative custom software development company. Our in-house team of highly skilled software developers has expertise in developing adaptable, scalable, and secure software that can integrate with your company’s systems and programs while helping you create an optimized and streamlined workflow. Take the first step towards building a reliable and highly efficient tailored software solution that adapts to your unique needs. Contact Bitbean today to discuss your requirements!
