To develop its own software or to buy off-the-shelf solutions? It’s an often-asked question for many businesses. While smaller companies prefer ready-made solutions as they are less costly than custom software, businesses cannot afford to ignore the potential competitive advantage of tailored product.
The main drawback of ready-made products is the fact that they fail to meet all requirements of all companies. Typically an organization will need some fine tuning to implement or deploy an off-the-shelf product. Moreover, there can be a problem of excessive quantity of updates (not all of them are needed to a particular company) or, on the contrary, sometimes off-the-shelf products are not updated for a long period of time so it turns out that f company use outdated software which may have negative impact on its business.
If one thinks that his “off-the-shelf” software doesn’t meet all company’s requirements, then considering the advantage of a custom designed solution may be a good idea. Custom Software has many advantages:
- It is specifically designed to meet one’s exact business needs and follow existing work-flow.
- Can potentially expose deficiencies in current business processes and provide a solution.
- May reduce personnel costs
- May improve integration with other systems
- Fees are usually paid once and the client becomes the owner of the solution so there are no ongoing licensing fees.
But, on the other side, not every company has the IT staff to build a solution and if they do chances are the IT staff may be over-taxed with everyday work. In addition, IT faces the challenge of stringent budgets and aggressive timelines for any development initiative. The pressure is often compound by the lack of expertise in required technologies. However, outsourced software development may be a way out, for it helps kill two birds with one stone – provide a company with required software and free the company’s IT to let them concentrate on their core activities.
Anyway, before considering any of the solutions, there are questions to be asked:
- How much customization would be required for the ready-made product to really do what’s needed?
- Would any business processes need to be changed to fit the application, and if so, is that good for an organization?
- What are the areas where your manufacturing process are unique—in a good way—and need to be preserved?
Answering those questions will lead to one of the following conclusions:
- A majority of the requirements can be met by a generic off-the-shelf application, but there are areas that need custom solutions to provide a competitive advantage;
- Company’s process and methodology are different enough that it makes more sense to build a custom system than to customize an off-the-shelf application.
