Just as you would not build a house without proper wiring, so you would not build a business without a proper software system. With Information Technology advancing at such a pace, it is understandable that many businesses do not know where to start with custom software solutions.
Of course, if you are reading this then you have already decided to invest in your business for the long-run. You have chosen custom-made over off-the-shelf. After all, your business is unique. Only by implementing solutions that work for your business and market needs can you hope to stand out from the competition.
What are “custom software solutions”?
With custom software solutions, you are creating and deploying technology and software. Your goal is to optimize your business by streamlining and automating processes. Custom software solutions enable you to be more innovative and to adapt to changing business needs more quickly. Therefore, implementing these solutions needs careful planning and strategic forward-thinking.
What do you Need when implementing Custom Software Solutions?
First, you need to choose the right partner who can truly understand you and your business. We all know the feeling when working with someone and everything just ‘clicks’. Investing in custom software solutions requires you to find a partner who is motivated by the success of your Software business. Together you can then do the right in-depth planning, deployment and testing required to implement your solutions.
Continuous Improvement to keep your Custom Software Solutions Relevant
When making any change to a business, you are also looking to improve what currently exists. Furthermore, as any good Continuous Improvement, or 6 Sigma, expert will tell you, the details are in the planning. How you define your problem will also have a large impact on your solutions.
As a general rule, here are the key basics to remember when embarking on custom software solutions, further detailed below:
- Choosing
the right partner - Flawless
Execution - Continuous Improvement for moving forwards
The right partner
Most businesses worry about the cost of custom software solutions. Whilst this is natural, with the right partner, you can work together to find the balance that works for you. It is a myth that custom software solutions are too expensive. Of course off-the-shelf solutions also accumulate yearly costs. These are due to upgrades, licenses and specialized training. With the right partner, you will be able to find appropriate cost-effective solutions, even if the costs are spread out differently over time.
Overall though, here are some useful tips to bear in mind when choosing your partner:
- What
is their expertise and service offering? - What
type of businesses do they tend to work with and are these comparable to yours? - Share
your digital and process pain points with them and listen to their responses.
Do they understand them as you do? - Consider the size and location of their company.
Flawless Execution
By implementing custom software solutions, you are essentially reviewing and improving your processes with your developer’s software engineers. All good engineers strive for perfection, or zero defects, and will follow a data-driven approach for implementing your solutions. As expected, there are many different models that developers use. However, these can be more or less summarised into define, design, implement and control phases.
Engineers often refer to ‘6 sigma’ or ‘continuous improvement’ when talking about flawless execution. Without going into the technicalities of those disciplines, their systematic approach to design and implementation provide best practice:
- Define
– This key first step involves understanding your current pain points as well
as your future needs. This is your planning phase. Basically, you are reviewing
what works and what does not currently work. - Measure
– Knowing the current process performance and frequency of pain points will
give you a starting point. From this, you can start thinking about possible
solutions with your partner. - Analyze
– Engineers often refer to ‘root cause’
as it is too easy to get caught up in problem symptoms and not actually
fix the problem at its core. This step is vital for you if you want to get the
right solutions rather than simply implementing a bandaid. - Improve
– The design phase can finally start now that you have all the data you need,
including your future requirements. - Control – Testing to remove errors is an important
phase, as is ongoing maintenance to preempt any possible future errors.
Continuous Improvement
The ongoing improvement of your processes and overall system is important. This will allow you to stay up to date and at the forefront of what you want to achieve. It is also much easier to monitor, maintain and improve in small, regular steps rather than in large overhauls. Continuous Improvement is at the core of system excellence. This means that all your processes are interlinked to provide the best performance and quality, whilst being cost-effective.
In order to support continuous improvement, the following points should be included in your custom software solutions. Your developer and partner will be able to provide details on how they approach these points:
- Quality
Control Plan - Maintenance
Plan - Future
Upgrade Plan - Training Plan
Bringing it Together
As you embark on your custom software solutions journey, remember that you need to balance your current needs with your future requirements. The right software partner will help you do this through a flawless execution. Excellence depends on proper planning and data-driven solutions that you can achieve through continuous improvement and a systematic approach. Spend more time on planning and defining the problems and a successful implementation will naturally follow through. You can then be sure that you are fully equipped and ready to take on the future.