Many of our clients are looking for technology to streamline and automate their business workflows to grow their businesses. Administrative tasks have a way of weighing teams down. When you convert a paper process to a digital workflow, that can go a long way to free up time. In addition, when you automate a digital process, that can save even more time. You can reallocate that time to other revenue-generating activities such as sales tasks, marketing strategies, product development, etc.
We develop technology for organizations to operate at their optimum. For example, we've helped solve business problems related to inventory management, event planning, custom reporting, and much more. Yes, off-the-shelf software addresses these types of workflows, but they don't always offer every function every user needs. So rather than finding a work-around or waiting for a feature release, companies customize their own software to do specifically what they need it to do when they need to do it.
Custom software improves operational productivity so that our customers can focus on their core competencies. It also allows them to be accessible, flexible, and innovative, giving them a competitive advantage.
Building Customized Software for Your Business
The primary advantage of building custom software for your business is that the application is designed for a specific workflow or to address a unique challenge. It's rare for out-of-the-box software to fulfill every business requirement completely. Users end up having to cobble something together with additional software or resort to manual processes.
However, building custom software requires strong communication and organizational skills, technical proficiency, and patience. Believe it or not, articulating the business need and objectives can be just as cumbersome as designing the solution.
Low-code and no-code development platforms certainly help ease development and speed up deployment, but user acceptance can be tricky. The application's design has to be user-friendly and intuitive. Modern and sleek interfaces are generally well-received. Performance has to be optimized so as not to consume additional resources. If it takes users more time to do the task with the custom software, they will be less motivated to use it. And accessibility is another important consideration. Generally, the path of least resistance entails running the program on familiar devices and operating systems.
In our experience of developing custom software for clients, the ultimate advantage of improved productivity and efficiency outweighs the time and effort it takes to build the system. Custom software development is more of an investment than an expense. Many of our clients are eager to expand/extend the capabilities of their initial solutions.
We rely on custom software to manage our business. FileMaker is the basis of our customer, project, and employee management functions. We also integrate FileMaker with HubSpot to optimize our marketing strategies. If there's anything FileMaker can't do, we haven't found it in the more than 30 years we've worked with it.
If you would like to learn more about how custom software can improve business productivity and operational efficiency, feel free to contact us.
