Why Custom Software?
From time to time, we all buy over-the-counter
software products - and for good reason. Generally,
they're economical - and, if they accomplish what we
need them to do, it makes good sense... business sense.
But there are other times when one can be penny wise
and pound foolish. When the software doesn't do
everything you need it to do and you must resort to
others measures to complete the routine day-to-day
tasks, it makes better sense to have custom software
developed for your company.
As an example, approximately 50% of the software currently utilized by our
company, Wade Instruments and Service, is commercially
available from many retail sources and perform quite
well. The remaining 50%,
we've developed specifically to meet our more targeted needs.
And even
though we developed these applications in house and at
cost
so to speak, some of them still required a significant
investment in time and resources - in the end, it still equates
to expense.
Having said that, those initial investments today seems
miniscule when compared to the time and resources we've
saved over the past 10 years. For example, when our
company first started, we used a readily available (and
popular) software suite to create our invoices and
service reports. Realizing that we were spending way to
much time creating and organizing these documents, we
developed our own software application to do the same
job and automate the documentation. This resulted in a
time savings of up to 90% to perform an even superior task.
In yet another example, one of our clients, nationally
known Something New Florist of Canfield, Ohio, does elaborate work for large weddings,
events and parties, not to mention a yearly gig at the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Their old process for developing a contract proposal for
a wedding or event entailed the use of a well known
office software suite. Painfully, they typed and edited
their proposal and manually calculated the sub-total,
tax, deposit and balance due, not to mention the
contract language. To their alarm, they discovered that by the
time all the editing was done and the final contract proposal was drawn and
approved, they had spent far too many hours in the
creation of the document, one they knew could be made
simpler and faster.
What we did for Something New Florist follows: We created a
software program that was simple to use and dedicated to
perform just one function... create event and wedding contract
proposals. By incorporating pre-defined label categories
and programming our software to complete all the
necessary calculations, it has saved them countless
hours. They now create contract proposals in about 1/3
the time they spent using the alternative methods.
Recycling the Source Code to bring prices down
You may not find exactly the right software
application you're looking for in our Downloads area,
but you may find one or two that has
features you find useful. We encourage you to sample as many as
you can, even if you doubt you'll ever need such
software as they may also possess functions you'll want
to incorporate into your own custom application. This is
known as recycling or reusing the source code. The more
source code we can reuse, the quicker (and more
economically) we can create your custom software application. |
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