Advantages of Custom (Bespoke) Software

Custom software has considerable advantages:

• You get exactly what you want.
• It works the way your company does. It’s written for your company and works the way you want it to.
• No licence fees, you can use it as often as you like and when and where you like. The application is your property!
• As it suits your company there may be little or no retraining required.
• Custom applications can be used by your customers as part of another service.
• Custom applications can be used to control your engineering product.

On the downside, there are other factors that you should consider before rushing out to a software house:

• Custom software can be expensive. Obviously, because instead of selling to a volume market, the developer is only supplying a single customer.
• You may have to wait many months for the software. It’s not off the shelf, although many software houses will try to incorporate pre-developed components to speed up the development time and reduce end costs.
• You have to specify carefully or you could end up with something that is not quite what you were expecting. Specifications can be a drawn out process, and failure to deliver what was expected can result in heavy financial loss for both the customer and the developer.

If the job is large and may take many months to develop, you can reduce the risk by specifying incremental modules where you take chunks of working software at regular intervals. The developer may also ask for payment on deliverables to reduce the heavy cash flow problems that can stem from employing high quality but expensive software development staff.

You should also think about support, bug fixing and future upgrades to the system. Can you expand the system without involving the original developers? What about warranty?

When you decide Custom software is a good idea for you, the next big step is who is going to develop and write it. You have a few choices here because you can do this internally (ie write it yourself) or take it externally (ie to a software house).

Keeping it internal will mean employing staff or at least employing contractors. If the job is only a few months then employing new full time staff may not be an option. Contractors are expensive and you need to supply some kind of project control, preferably by someone who understands the process of software development.

Projects can take much longer than you think and problems can cost you a great deal of time and money. In either case you will need to invest in the tools of the software development trade.

Going to a good software house is probably an easier option as they will have the infrastructure, programmers, tools and experience. They can advise you of what specifications are required and can do the job on a fixed price basis.

Be prepared to work as a partnership; the success of the project is important to both sides. Both developer and client need to be flexible. At the end of the day it’s not what you pay for – it’s what you get.