The emerging demand for a business software system isn’t a newfound issue. In case you are running a business, you require software to improve productivity, decrease costs, increase efficiencies, and streamlining business processes. Hence, your business may need custom software. Also, software automation assists businesses of all sizes as well as stature.

Running a business comprises of different aspects like operations, supply chain, customer relation, administration, and analytics. Hence, all of this together without any particular technology leads to chaos as well as mismanagement.

Even when your competitors are in the same domain or niche actually decide to micromanage all of these aspects with technology, essentially meaning, custom software, then it means they have a competitive advantage which you need to have too. Hence, best web development services are hired to develop such solutions for these businesses.

Most of the time, people are in a dilemma to whether to buy an off-the-shelf software or go for custom software development. Yes, you can easily go for readymade software in case you think the software completely fits your requirement.

Also, the cost incurred will be quite less. However, with such software, flexibility and scalability is always under question. Seamless integration of such software with any other enterprise system will need extra added development. Also, since many businesses will be using the same software in your niche, then you won’t have a competitive advantage.

So, let’s go through a checklist to evaluate if you are looking to develop custom software.

 

Evaluation Checklist 

 

Overwhelming Manual Processes and Paperwork leading to Decrease in Efficiency

Among the basic objectives of a business is to increase its own revenue. Also, the chances of obtaining higher revenue increase by drastic proportion whenever there is much higher productivity. However, you will often find that your employees were struggling and overwhelmed with too much manual work or always busy in entering endless data into the spreadsheets that result in an increased amount of time in order to complete their work and increases human error too.

Here, a custom software developed by a custom software developer as per your requirements is a seemingly perfect solution. Collaboration software will essentially offer you a comprehensive environment for all of the employees with the particular permission to easily plan as well as execute different workflows and even communicate seamlessly along with access them at any time and from anywhere.

For instance, a real estate company can develop a custom software where the backend mobile app and software are built to massively inculcate automation of indoor as well as outdoor field inspections, even reducing the manual errors and finally bring down the entire delivery time in drastic proportion without actually compromising the quality as well as improving the reliability and efficiency of the process.

 

 

Need to Sort Daily Recurring Problems

It is a common problem for small businesses as well as start-ups. Often times, they tend to manage more than a couple of clients at one time, all by themselves. Hence, it means organizing email addresses along with contact information, sending an email, assignment of similar tasks, sending important notifications, meeting scheduling, creating invoices, etc., all day long, every day.

Hence, the investment made in custom software development will allow you to easily automate all of these different repetitive tasks without any type of hassle, automatically. You can easily scale your own business is quite an error-free manner. Also, it assists you and your team to achieve better visibility along with improved business insights as well as scalability, which is immensely required.

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Manual Tracking and Analysis of Data

Most of the business spend a major portion of their time in collection and monitoring as well as analyzing along with reporting data. Most of this work is done on spreadsheets as entire businesses are run on it. It takes a significant amount of time to enter the data manually and even more when it comes to maintaining it. It doesn’t even offer any information quickly and immediately, and nothing positive can be said about analytics.

Custom software is a one-stop solution for these issues as with analytics duly integrated within it, a business can easily monitor all of the necessary metrics as well as KPIs or key performance indicators right at one place and even share specific details regarding the business with team members which keep the confidentiality intact.

One of the real-time instances of custom software development is an analytics tool that is custom-built such that data on different link visits from across the world can easily be collected and different decision-makers can obtain valuable insights and make informed decisions backed by data. Hence, you need a web development company to provide you with such a solution which analyze the data.

Also, the implementation of the latest technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning with Big Data helps in gaining insights from a large volume of data. A custom software enabled with these technologies can certainly reduce the decision overload on the business owners and provide them valuable information and insights which can certainly improve their decision making and addressing the key pain points which are gathered through data.

 

Difficulty in reaching to customers and managing them

For a business, custom relations is quite essential. But in recent times, it seems like businesses can’t keep up with their customer base and it is duly subjected to numerous customer complaints along with escalation mails as well as poor customer response in company surveys. This means its time for a swift technological switch.

In case you are out of ideas on how to keep up with different social media channels that your customers are actually present then a custom software solution will easily and efficiently manage all of the customer information along with their project flow information as well as team responsible for the entire project and certainly maintain constant collaboration between clients as well as the people that are involved in the project.

It can even integrate email along with customer support as well as social media engagement tools which you allow you to easily look for information at the moment of crisis.

 

Expansion of business

Constant growth and consistent expansion are on the mind of any business owner from the very first moment of establishment of the business. In case your business is consistently expanding in terms of employees, location or customers, you certainly require business process management custom software in place.

It will assist in managing workflow, which can easily be changed on-the-fly. Also, it assists in integrating all of the information which is accessible at all of the locations such that your team can easily work with customers as well as another team all over the globe, without any constraint, and hence increasing efficiency and saving costs.

Once you have evaluated the need to develop custom software, let’s discuss a checklist to evaluate for custom software development.

 

Custom Software Product Development

When it comes down to custom software development, most of the process includes distinct parts other than developing the software itself. Coding is just a small segment of development as well as the release of the software product. Along with it, brainstorming, administrative tasks as well as testing combinedly overtake the total amount of time spent on designing, developing and coding the software product.

The entire software development process is multi-faceted. Although projects may certainly differ in terms of size as well as complexity, all of them actually go through some types of stage. A custom software development company has to consider this aspect at all times.

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It involves designing a particular software for a certain user, an entire group of a specific audience, or organization, and it is certainly not packaged for the purpose of reselling. Custom software is essentially designed to specifically address the requirements of the target organization instead of more prevalent and traditional off-the-shelf software. Custom software is generally developed by a custom software development company or a team of developers of the organization itself.

 

Value of Project Development Planning of Custom Software

It is essential to put massive advanced planning in order to get the better part of your investment in the development of custom software.

Project planning assists you in accounting different features of the software that the business requires, such that you don’t have to ask for new features in the future. You have to ensure that you completely address all security features along with key integrations in the entire project scope such that you don’t actually have to drift over the entire defined budget and timeline.

 

 

In case you fail to plan well, infamous “scope creep” can occur. It occurs whenever the client actually comes up with a specific new requirement between the project development, which causes delays as well as cost overruns.

Also, by covering all of your bases before the beginning of the development, you can easily prevent scope creep and achieve a finely polished final software product soon. Also, key subject matter experts and players, within the organization needs to be involved too in the entire planning process. Inform your custom software developer about the suggestions made by these people.

Let’s have a detailed overview of the checklist of steps that you need to follow:

 

Checklist 

 

Step 1 – Goals Determination

The key question to answer whenever you are thinking for a custom development project is what exactly the software has to accomplish for the business.

1. Do you wish to expand the productivity of the company without even hiring new employees?
2. Do you wish to reduce or simply eliminate errors in the business processes via automation?
3. Do you wish to streamline the business processes by means of getting rid of inefficiencies?
4. Do you wish to increase the sales figures or achieve better and improved customer satisfaction?

While moving to the next step, it is better to identify the key top priorities for the project first along with metrics and different KPIs or key performance indicators that you will be actually used to measure the success of the project in achieving them.

 

Step 2- Mapping Business Processes

Whenever you are mapping business processes, the essential trick is to have all of the key players duly involved without crowding the team. You need to speak with relevant people who know the daily operations as well as the pain points which the employees are currently facing.

Through listening to these varieties of suggestions and issues, you can easily propose different solutions like custom integrations as well as reports which can easily make the employees much better informed as well as more productive. However, failing to understand the requirements of the business will certainly result in a final custom software product which isn’t useful to anyone at all.

 

Step 3- Establish Necessary and Additional Features

Even if there are numerous things that are possible with custom software, that doesn’t mean that every one of them should be included in the project. Moreover, if you have a grand vision of the custom software, still, you need to be quite realistic and then prioritize features in terms of actual value that those features bring to the organization, whether the features are internal or customer-facing.

The necessary features are the ones that directly benefit the business. For instance, reduction of errors, cost savings, improved output. The additional features are those which are desirable but finally optional, like better reporting features or an appealing and attractive user interface.

 

Step 4- Keep Space for Business-Specific Features

Since you know about your business better than anyone, hence you have to proactively consider the various industry laws as well as regulations that you need to deal with. The development company might be familiar with a few of these standards and might have worked with different other businesses in the same industry, but they won’t actually know the specific requirements and rules much better than you.

Hence, it is quite crucial that you let your custom software development company know about these at the earliest. Various industry regulations often need the software that you use to be completely updated and free from different security vulnerabilities. Hence, your custom website development company needs to perform a security check of the software once a year, at least.

With hackers becoming highly-capable and more intrusive, you need to ensure the security of the software. Otherwise, you risk losing valuable business and customer data which can be disastrous to the business.

 

Step 5- Establish Budget 

The key aspect of custom software is that they can fit all budgets of different sizes. Also, the entire scale of the project along with the addition of different custom features like integrations as well as reporting can play a key role in the final price figure. Hence, before you speak to a custom software product development company, create your own estimate of the entire project budget.

It will certainly help that company to understand better what you are expecting out of your money. Also, it will allow you to inculcate the necessary features and give you a leeway to add extra features if the budget allows. It also helps in deciding the most crucial features as cost of development leads to prioritization of the features that need to be included.

 

 

Conclusion

The key rule of any technology utilized in a business is that complete automation applied to quite an effective operation will certainly magnify the entire efficiency. Also, the automation applied to an inefficient operation will certainly magnify the inefficiency.

Custom software development for a business is quite a big step as it will completely integrate the essential and key aspects of the functioning of the company and also play a key part in the operations of the company and its success. Also, it will certainly result in a boost in productivity as well as an increase in revenue. That’s why successful businesses often hire the best web development services for such solutions.

If you follow the above-mentioned checklist, then you can know your business requires a good technological boost. Consider taking a leap of faith on the basis of due diligence and ensure that you completely understand the entire processes that you are actually looking to automate.

So, evaluate all the processes, make the list of the objectives, find out the requirements and hire best custom software development company which will assist you to develop your own custom software which will offer a return of investment or ROI of multiple times the entire investment in terms of cost-effectiveness, time-saving and risk reduction via a scalable, structured, and comprehensive custom software.