Articles
Innovation
Why build a custom business system?
In today’s connected economy, it is sometimes the smallest of margins that provides a business with the competitive edge it needs to succeed. One factor that many companies fail to account for is the benefits available to them through the creation of customized software.
When companies face issues unique to their business, custom software can streamline workflows and automate processes. Manually compiling reports, inefficient management of resources, siloed databases, and cumbersome data collection are all problems that custom software can solve.
While there are similarities in process from one business to the next, no two businesses are exactly alike. How a company creates a system for their operations can be a key differentiator between businesses that succeed or fail. Project workflow, approvals, scheduling, work orders, dispatch, employee management and invoicing are just a few areas of the business that can make or break margins and customer success. There is no shortage of off-the-shelf software that will claim to address these pains, but patching together several tools that "almost" work often results in lack of adoption and little efficiency gain.
Solving A Problem
To put it into context, consider the problem facing James E. Fulton & Sons – one of Southwest Michigan’s most trusted construction and excavation companies. They had a problem of misaligned processes for updating and automating workflow and administrative procedures.
At Fulton, staff had to organize, reconcile and file thousands of papers per week. Reports included multiple different timesheets as well manual generation of client reports. The impact to the business was significant not only regarding effort and resources but perhaps more importantly– time.
The solution created for Fulton came in the form of a custom web application that automated all back-end processes. The application cut down the time taken to reconcile papers from days to just a few hours per week.