The Operational Value of Custom Software
Software should help your organization thrive, but it often just gets in the way
Custom software isn’t just valuable from a technology perspective. When done right, it makes a huge impact on operations. Especially for businesses that are totally dependent on operations—supply chain, logistics, construction and construction management, and other businesses that deal with repeatable processes, reporting, and tracking.
The Value of Custom Software
Increase Efficiency
This is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about software that helps with operations. In today’s day and age, technology is a must have to compete in any industry. While it still takes (and will always take) humans to run the show, technology should improve productivity and efficiency. Specifically for jobs that require lots of administrative and repeatable tasks, there is huge opportunity to greatly improve the output of each individual employee through automating much of the standard process work.
Build Capacity
When efficiency increases significantly, more money and team members are freed up to focus on higher value items. This often means more focus on business development, investing in research, or improving customer experience. Or, if sales isn’t a problem, it allows a company to scale up much faster. This obviously has a positive impact on the bottom line.
Tear Down Knowledge Towers
Many small-medium size businesses deal with a major problem: knowledge towers. One person with too much non-transferable knowledge about how to run the business. They know every process, and they control most key relationships. If something happened to this person, the business would be in serious jeopardy.
One surprising value we’ve seen from building custom software: it helps tear down knowledge towers. In order to build the right software solution, we’re forced to draw out knowledge and processes that used to be stuck inside one person’s head. As we build these processes into the software, we’re codifying them for the whole company to better understand and implement. This decentralizes knowledge in a way that enables the company to scale and thrive, without being dependent on one person.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of the value custom software can provide. There’s also a lot of great off-the-shelf software out there for logistics, project management, data tracking, and other operations focused tasks. But if you’re interested in hearing what a custom solution would look like for you and your business, let us know.
