As the economic climate continues its hold managers and business owners are continuing to seek tangible opportunities to reduce costs and increase efficiencies. On initial consideration the feasibility of this appears to be an enigma however complacency and time pressures in organisations of all sizes reveal intensive manual processes, repeat data entry, disconnected systems and burdensome administrative tasks which can easily be streamlined with a low investment in custom software.

• Streamline Operations
• Increase Workforce Efficiencies
• Connect your Mobile Workforce
• Increase Operational Efficiencies
• Slash Duplication of Effort
• Reduce Operating Costs
• Remove burdensome Administration

Successful departmental and core line of business applications can quickly outgrow their original purpose leaving slow performing spreadsheets and database applications which are prone to corruptions and support only a few simultaneous users.
Typically many organically emerged in-house application do not perform well over mobile and wide area network connections and as business acquisitions, new offices setup and home working grows in trend supporting mobile field staff and a disparate workforce needs smart and secure connectivity solution along with specialist and custom software solutions.
Return on investment can be easily calculated to support investment justification by calculating the amount of man hours saved versus the cost of development.
For example an estate agents inputting new rental property has spend the past five years inputting the property information to internal spreadsheets then check with the accounts team then re-enter the information onto the company web site and place the property with several advertising media taking 3 hours each. The custom software removes duplication in this pipeline, provides integration with accounting systems, third-parties and internal departments to reduce the operation to 30 minutes freeing up the salesperson to generate more leads and develop new opportunities. In this real world scenario the business gained over 83% efficiency saving in a workforce of 12 staff for processing sales of rental properties.
The business case writes itself and as a department manager or business owner you can decide to run the operation with a smaller team or increase volume.
Custom Software is not for every requirement but does allow you to define the way you want to work without confirming to an off-the-shelf package that is designed for the mass market.
SymTex are specialists in custom database and software development building robust solutions for SME public and private sector clients including big banking corporations, insurance giants and national utility companies working nationwide.

Tell us about your database and software challenges.
Visit us at symtex.co.uk or call 0800 58 70 949 today.

This question is not unique to non-software developers, often we encounter this scenario internally, and being a development company you would imagine from the outside our software was all singing in perfect harmony with workflows, integrated CRM and web site etc... and we’re working on it.  However if I had my way the choice would be to build a customised solution from the ground up; integrating with all existing applications in the environment, Accounts, CRM, Invoicing and so on using SaaS (Software as-a Service) to loosely couple distinct functional tools and products used throughout the enterprise together. 

The benefits developing bespoke SaaS solutions is that when you come to implement they behave exactly as you specified and achieve the job from day one, albeit a few minor bugs to work out.  The alternative is selecting an existing product which may well not be open-source and introducing a dependency on external vendors to build in new functionality, provide bug fixes and the like.  However the investment is normally low when considered against how much time it would take internally to develop and test internal solutions and of-course at the distraction to business as usual activities and neglecting potential business growth, networking and sales opportunities.

So how do you decide whether to build or buy?  From a commercial view the right questions need to be asked to discover total cost, timescales, ongoing support, contractual requirements, dependencies and service level agreements.  Often SLAs don’t work too well internally as the concept to leverage financial weight is lost.  Techies within an organisation will already often be saturated with workload and whilst happy to take on a new requirement this may be outside of core skills and a steep learning curve is required at the cost expense, and often pain, of their employer.

What factors do you consider when choosing to build or buy?