Software development is a technical process which involves conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing during the creation and maintenance of applications, frameworks, or other software components.
As a software development company, we believe that there are many benefits to this process. In this article we will share with you five ways in which software development can help to grow your business. These are:
1. Improving customer, client and employee satisfaction:
Custom web application development services allows for optimised business processes. Every business has their own model and way of working, therefore software needs to be developed in such a way that it can align with a unique business model. This way employees will have the roadblock of having to learn a whole new process removed, while customers will be excited to receive such sophisticated bespoke software solutions.
Custom software development helps to build something a bit different. It can help connect a workforce together as you define your integration points. This allows different teams within a business to be interlinked, as well as streamlining processes, which will improve the way employees work and communicate with each other.
2. Saving time and money:
While creating a bespoke software solution may sound more expensive than a commercially available one, there are in fact time and money saving aspects to this service. Businesses may well be wary about the likely custom software development cost, but a bespoke application may not necessarily come with a price tag that is excessively more expensive. For example, COTS packages from some vendors can involve significant up-front licensing costs as well as not being totally fit for purpose when it comes to the client’s specific requirements.
Furthermore think about this, how much time and effort have you and your company put into researching different off the shelf solutions, scrutinising over costs, testing them, adopting them, and learning how to use them effectively. And as your business grows and technology adapts, new commercial solutions will need to be found to keep up to date with changing business requirements.
By investing in custom web application development services, you can get your hours of research back and instead have a custom piece of software built. This software will be built accordingly, in line with business needs and will have the flexibility to change as your goals do.
3. Increasing flexibility:
The growth of a business is affected by the demands and needs of potential customers. Some industries can be extremely volatile when it comes to changing opinions, with a constant demand for a change in products. As mentioned, custom software development services allows for greater flexibility, and therefore businesses are more easily able to adapt their products and services to what their target audience require.
This extra flexibility means that you do not have to mould your working processes to suit a particular system, instead it can be tailored to how you work instead. The effects of software development will be easily seen, as it means your bespoke solution will evolve as your needs and complexities change over time.
By having a system specifically suited to your business processes, and only your processes, it can help your business grow as and when you need to, rather than impede your progress.
3. Gaining a competitive advantage:
Many companies will be using the same off the shelf packages, therefore no competitive edge is being gained by this. Switching to a custom software development solution can give yourself the chance to solve problems which your competitors cannot.
While your competitive edge may decrease over time as more companies seek this solution, your program will still fit your exact needs, not those of your competition. Therefore, you will be still be functioning the best you can while still holding the edge over competitors who do not customise.
It may also be possible to negotiate ownership of the intellectual property, meaning you have complete control of who uses it, and how it is used. For example the first Internet of Things software came in 1982 when Carnegie Mellon University modified a Coke machine to report its inventory and give updates on whether newly loaded drinks were cold. This just shows how valuable custom development solutions can be.
4. Supporting business expansion:
All of our reasons so far have lead us to this, expansion. When a business wants to expand it will need the time and money to do so, be able to be flexible, all of which will help gain a competitive edge and lead to further improved customer satisfaction.
If your business plans to add more services, locations, or employees in the next few years, then utilising the benefits of custom software development can help the expansion take place more smoothly.
Bespoke software solutions update and evolve much quicker than off the shelf packages. For example, if you have a commercial software package, you may be at the end of a long queue, waiting for your updates to be made, and even when they are done they may not address your concerns properly or meet your exact specifications.
In contrast to this, custom software solutions are all about what you do and what you want. Therefore it is clear to see that if your business is looking to expand, custom software development services are what you should be looking for.
What we offer
Here at 97 Technologies we are able to provide a wide range of custom software development services. With over 20 years of experience in the industry, we have handled many large and small scale projects for a plethora of clients from industrial, commercial and professional industries.
This work has included working on complex bespoke software solutions that have involved multi-site integration and multilingual requirements that have demanded skilful software and custom app programming by our operations team. If you would like to take advantage of the benefits we have talked about in this article and want software development to help grow your business, please get in touch with us today.