Problem with most people is - they don't see their problems. You are running small, medium or even a big company. Everything seems fine, you get decent income, your employees are happy and you have clients. It seems that there's no room for optimization, no way to make things better, but is this the reality or just a fool's paradise?
Well, as it turns out lots of companies are living in the past. They refuse to embrace new technology solutions, that will make them agile and will help them save money. Here are 8 signs that will tell you if you can optimise your business processes by using custom-made software.
You don't automate anything
Probably one of the first needs ever solved by computers is optimising repetitive tasks. Software automation is fairly advanced nowadays and can save lots of man-hours, which saves money. If you find yourself doing the same thing or similar things (like invoices, payroll, inventory, etc.) over and over again, then custom software is probably one possible solution. Not only will you save time and therefore money, but more importantly you'll be able to avoid some small technical mistakes, that are easy to make otherwise.
Many apps for a single task
So you have an e-commerce web app, through which you receive orders. But you also have an app for handling sales, another for shipping, one that bills, one that invoices, a time tracker for your employees of course, etc. etc. etc... oh and don't forget those Excel/Google Spreadsheets used as reporting tools. Sounds like a normal setup for most of the companies, right? Well, probably yes, but there's room for optimisation. All this can be done within the e-commerce web app you're already using and big part of the data input and the reports generating can be fully automated and a lot less error prone. Sounds good, right? All thanks to custom web development!
Many steps for a single action
It's frustrating and inefficient to take multiple steps to complete a single action. General purpose ERPs, CRMs, and other management software try to be jack of all trades. Sadly they end up being master of none. With custom made business management software you're guaranteed to have your interface and functionalities tailored for your specific case.
More than one location
If you operate in more than one office then communication is usually a problem. You will have to use flash drives or transfer files via e-mail and then compare, edit, etc. This is a cumbersome and error-prone process. But with a custom website or application you can avoid this and save yourself the trouble of synchronizing the data between offices.
Doing reports by hand
Back in the day everybody used Excel (or something similar) to create their reports. There were people filling tons of data into spreadsheets by hand, that generated reports. The more tech savvy used a database with complex queries to get the data and some visualization tool to generate the charts. Of course a single typo or any other simple error could mess up those reports quickly. Nowadays all the business intelligence, reports, analytics, etc. should be automated. This is easily achieved with tailor-made web app.
Lots of paper
People should quit tobacco and businesses should quit paper! Going paperless means being environmentally friendly, cost effective and of course up-to-date. If you find yourself using tons of paper, constantly printing and scanning stuff, using O(ptical) C(haracter) R(ecognition) software to convert some of your documents to digital form, then it's probably time to switch. Custom software, tailored especially for you, will help you to drastically reduce the amounts of paper you use.
Hard to use apps
Not all apps are intuitive and easy to use. If doing something with your current software seems too hard and unnecessarily complicated - it probably is. However there's an alternative - you can get yourself some custom-made app with interfaces created according to your own wishes, granting you ease of use.
Paying too much for apps
Many people still think that custom-made software is way too expensive for them. This is actually a thing of the past. Nowadays most of the off the shelf software has exceptionally high licensing costs, monthly or yearly fees as well as installation and integration costs. If you do the calculation you'll find out that most of the times hiring an agency to create a specialized piece of software for you is actually way cheaper, than buying some commercial solution.
If you see yourself in the situations described above and what do to something about it, that will help you to reduce costs, save time, make your processes less error prone, go ahead and write us a few lines about it, we can help!