With software at the forefront of business operations, we explore how bespoke software development can be used to help to grow your business

Every day, the business world places greater reliance on software for routine processes and functionalities. 

Much of this software is off-the-shelf solutions that are adopted and incorporated into working patterns using a “best endeavours” approach. In this blog, we explore how using bespoke software development solutions can help to grow your business by exploring the benefits it can bring and the problems that it will solve.

Tailor-Made to Your Requirements

 Off-the-shelf software has been built to meet a wide variety of standardised objectives, suitable for all organisations. Where as bespoke software has been designed to meet the exact and specific requirements of your particular business. No longer will you have to alter your processes to fit a piece of software, instead you will be altering a piece of software to fit your processes. 

Paying for What You Need 

The functionality built into off-the-shelf software will often fall into one of three categories: 

  1. Functionality you need and use every day
  2. Functionality you can see the benefit of but don’t require now.
  3. Functionality that will never be relevant to your business.

Unfortunately, categories 2 and 3 are often larger than category 1. This means the greatest proportion of your subscription will not be utilised.. With bespoke software development,  you will only be paying for the functions that are relevant to you. This will boost your return on investment (ROI), allowing you to invest your remaining budget elsewhere.

Creating a Competitive Advantage

A sure-fire method of growing your business is by winning customers from your competitors. By employing bespoke software development, you can improve processes, efficiencies and customer service. This will boost your reputation across the marketplace which will attract prospects to your business and help your bottom-line to grow. 

It is important to not only analyse any shortcomings in your own business when developing bespoke software, but also undertake a full competitor analysis to identify their weaknesses and develop the software with these in mind. 

Integrations

With the business world dependant on software services for every facet of business operations, bespoke software development presents the opportunity to integrate these solutions into one piece of software. Instead of having to manually enter data into multiple pieces of software, you enter it once and use the API’s developed by your developers to send it everywhere that is needed. Not only is this a great time-saver but this also allows for consistency whilst ensuring that there are fewer points for human input error to occur.

Enjoy Greater Support and Development

It is a legal obligation for software developers to support bespoke software for as long as required. With mass-produced software, you can often wait months for bugs to be fixed and developments to be implemented. With bespoke software, never again will you receive a “Thank you for the request, we are aware of this issue and plan to rectify it as part of our Q4 development roadmap” email. Instead, you define the roadmap, and your bespoke software development agency is legally obligated to work to it.

Security

With the evolution of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), businesses are placing a great deal of faith in the security policies of their software provider and 3rd party datacentre companies. With bespoke software development, you regain control and can ensure the data centres comply with the legislative regulations required.

Scalability

With growth a key driver in using bespoke software, it is important to design the software so it can be quickly upscaled without any disruption. When using off-the -shelf software, upscaling can be quite a lengthy process, and often results in changes to features, interface and pricing.  

How Minerva Can Help

Here at Minerva, our bespoke software development services enable businesses to get the most out of their specification and budget. We work with you to provide the most comprehensive, efficient and cost-effective solution for your business’ software requirements.

Contact us today to find out how we can help with your bespoke software development requirements.