Do you need Custom Software?

All major corporations use custom software because they know the competitive advantage that custom software can provide. Almost every small and medium sized business needs custom software, they often just don’t know it. With that in mind what signs can you look for to determine whether you need custom software or not.

If you are doing one or more of the following you need custom software:

1. You are maintaining business information in spreadsheets such as Excel or even in word processing documents.

Spreadsheets are good for quick calculations and playing with data to see what data you need to keep. Once you have determined this, why would you want to keep this data in a spreadsheet?

• They are inherently single user and hard to share.

• The business rules the spreadsheet contains can easily be violated.

• They are hard to validate and maintain.

• Security is virtually non-existent.

Storing your data in spreadsheet almost guarantees that you will lose your data someday and never be able to really trust it.

2. Besides your information in your spreadsheets you are saving additional information in desktop databases.

Professional IT shops hate desktop databases like Microsoft Access or Foxpro; why? Because eventually they always get corrupted and lose data. They are almost always poorly designed, hard to maintain and hard to trust.

3. You have developed “Workarounds” to overcome faults or limitations in your business software.  

Line of Business software is supposed to be an expression of your business ideas. It is supposed to help you run the business how you want to run it. In reality when you buy off-the-shelf business software you are seeing an expression of the developers’ business ideas, not yours. At best, the ideas contained may include ideas from the software’s customer base so you are paying for software that doesn’t improve your business competitiveness.

So what are the Pros and Cons of Off-the-Shelf software?

4. You have actually altered the way you would like to do business to accommodate your business software.

Once again this is a question of whether you are in business to do it your way or do it someone else’s way.  If you are using a large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system such as SAP or PeopleSoft and you need to customise it in some areas to suit business practices that support your competitiveness you will need very deep pockets.

5. You have to manually input the same data into two or more programs.

Aside from the fact that this is costing your business money in duplicating the same data it is error prone.

What it all means  

All of the above are signs that you need custom software because either you are altering your business to accommodate the needs of your current system or you are fighting your current system.

Your business system should be there to help you take your company to the next level, not to stand in your way. Your business software should help you do it your way and do it efficiently.