How to Build a Customised Software for Your Business?

We know how important your business is for you and facing some challenges related to it might be really hard for you sometimes. The situation becomes even harder when you can’t address your challenges with software.

Looking at your challenges related to your business, if you have decided to get a customised software built for your business, you have taken the correct step. Actually, the IT spending on customised software all around the world is somewhere around 599$ Billion in 2021. This statistic will surely validate your choice.

Just have a look at amazon, one of the biggest online businesses that use customised software with AI to collect the data on the product preferences of the customer. The algorithm of a customised software knows what the customer is actually looking for and helps in creating a better shopping experience for everyone.

Just like that, no matter if your business is small, medium, or large, creating a customised software application will make sure your business does better. So, let’s get to know about how to build customised software for your business.

What Is Customised Software Development?

Customised software development is about designing software apps to address the issues faced by the user within a business. customised software development services fix the needs of a user better than a ready-made software.

Such as, MS Office or Adobe, which are specially made to fix the challenges of specific needs of a software user. But, you cannot update or fix the functionalities of these softwares according to your specific requirements.

On the contrary, customised software development requires a complete plan and is built by a software development team or an in-house developer. The procedure of customised software development includes:

• Design.
• Development.
• Deployment.
• Maintenance of the Software.

A customised software is developed by keeping the management, branding, implementation needs, and business procedures of a company in mind. 

Before you decide the software development plan, let's just discuss the 5 main steps of creating a customised software for the specific requirements of your business.

5 Steps to Create Customised Software

If you are willing to develop a customised software for your business, then check out these 5 steps to create a customised software for your business. All these steps are explained down below in detail. So, let’s get into it and understand every step in a simple way.

Identify the Challenges of Your Business

We are all aware that every business has its unique process of work and requirements of their business. One software can not fulfil the requirements for every business.

So, you need a customised software to solve all your issues related to your business, like:

• Managing a huge number of employees.
• Increasing the efficiency of work.
• Boosting the revenue of your business.
  
  

So, when you are starting to develop your customised software app, identify the challenges of your business first that you are worried about a lot. Discuss your issues and requirements properly with the management team, business leaders and workers.

After this phase of discovering your issues, it is time for you to analyse the requirements of your business that can help in reducing the difficulties.

Analyse the Requirements of Your Business

Once you have listed down all your challenges, focus on the functionalities and features that you want to integrate into your software. Ensure adding the advanced features that will be helpful in streamlining the process of your business for a long time.

So, analyse what your business needs and what can help you in streamlining your business. Let’s take an example to learn this step in a better way. If you own an in-demand business and are facing issues in managing the data of your customers or want to generate new leads. 

Actually, according to some study, it has been found that without CRM, around 79% of marketing leads don’t convert into sales. We ensure that you wouldn’t allow this to happen to your business. And obviously, no other business owner would want to lose their marketing leads.

So, we have also shared some of the common features that you can consider for the customised software application you will have. Here are some main features:

• Task scheduler system.
• Integration with current systems.
• Accounting and finance.
• Work automation.
• Safety and security.
• Customer relationship management (CRM).
• Migration from off-the-shelf software to new software.

After you decide all the functionalities and features of your customised software, create the architecture design of it.

Hire the Customised Software Development Company

There are a lot of software development companies in the market of customised software development. So, it becomes really hard to choose a company that will understand your business requirements and offer you the same results that your business requires. 

Actually, many businesses believe in outsourcing the development work to a customised software development company. Recently, the outsourcing market of development has globally reached around USD 92.5 Billion in 2019. Also, here are some advantages of outsourcing your development work to a software developing company.

• Aids in saving time.
• Lessens the risk of software development work.
• Makes scaling more convenient.
• The larger labour pool of talented workers.
• Have access to various services.

When it is about having a reliable technical partner, we can make sure that Enou will be an ideal choice for all business. We believe in giving the best software solutions to your business needs. We understand your business requirements properly and deliver the best customised software services without any compromise on the quality.

Honestly, we are amongst the best software development companies.  We offer customised software development services that will help in enhancing the efficiency of your business.

Let us now move ahead to the next step of the development process, where we will be discussing the development of a software and testing the parts of a software.

Development and Testing

Now that you have decided your software development company according to your preference, you can start the development procedure by signing an agreement. To keep your information and ideas safe, signing an NDA is important.

Also, know that this step is a really long one where you will have to invest your time and effort to build customised software. Being a business owner, you will have to make sure everything is in line and that the process of development is going perfectly.

For this, you can reach the project managers regularly or reach the fixed development team. Also, just know that when all the components like system requirements, architecture, and wireframe are finalised, executing the plan will be quicker and more convenient.

Once your customised software is ready, the development team will do a testing of the software. This phase will include different kinds of functional and non-functional testing. This is either obtained manually or automatically.

Functional Testing

• Unit testing
• Component testing
• Smoke testing
• Sanity testing
• Regression testing
• Integration testing
• API testing
• UI testing

Non Functional Testing

• Compatibility testing
• Availability testing
• Performance testing
• Usability testing
• Scalability testing
• Localization testing
• Reliability testing
• Volume testing

Except this list, it is important to test the customised software for:

• The core application functionality.
• Text input.
• Installation on local machines.
• Security of the software.

If any error is detected, it can be fixed and re-tested. The whole process of testing will continue until the quality of the required software matches the actual requirements of your business. The developing team will make sure that everything is working smoothly and the software application is providing the same results as expected.

After testing successfully, your software is now ready to get launched.

Deployment and Maintenance

Now, you and your customer will start finding your system familiar. You all will be using the software now. So, you need to make sure that the development company will support the software app after its release.

You can choose to install the software in your current system. Then, under the development company’s guidance, end-users will be trained to use the software. Slowly, your team will learn to use the software, and the integration of your software with current systems can be applied. 

If your software needs to be maintained or upgraded, you can reach out to the development company. But, you need to talk about this to the software developing company already if they offer maintenance services or not. This will streamline the whole process of development and so, you can avoid paying extra maintenance cost. 

After the discussion of these 5 steps of creating a customised software application, you must now be aware how you can start the whole app development process or software development process.

Read More: How to choose CMS?

Types of Customised Software

A great developer can take an idea for a custom business software and has the ability to make that idea real. If you are thinking of getting a custom software developed and designed for your business, then Enou can help you with that. Some of the best types of custom softwares that will be beneficial for businesses are:

1- Operations Management Software

This software can be built to help a business with everything including automating manufacturing abilities and managing the business procedures as well. But, the main cause of the Operation Management Software is to make sure that the operations of a business are really efficient and effective to help them deliver the greatest possible results to their customers.

2- ECommerce Software

As a lot of businesses nowadays depend on the sale of their products and by providing services, having an online store along with a website can be a great way to increase your revenue streams. While some simple eCommerce software is available, businesses with hard requirements should have their own eCommerce software built for their specific needs or get the existing tool customised by the developer to meet the requirements of your business.

3- Enterprise Resource Planning Software

This software is made to help businesses manage everyday operations like accounting, procurement, risk management, project management, and supply chain operations. Custom built ERP systems can be made to mix up a few business processes into a single convenient to use system, while also getting rid of any extra data duplication.

4- Content Management Systems

A CM system is specially designed to help a business update their website with new content like blog posts, documents, press releases, and videos without having a developer to help you. While most of the businesses can have a free or paid CMS package, some will have to get a custom one to meet the unique requirements of their business.

5- Customer Relationship Management Systems

A CRM system is the best solution for a business to help in keeping track of customs, prospective customers, referrals, vendors, and other people their business is linked with. If you find that none of the general CRM tools are suitable for your business, you can have a customised CRM software developed with some extra tools that are perfect for the needs of your business.

After reading and knowing about software development phases first, you can easily pick the correct sdlc model for your development project.

Pros and Cons of a Customised Software

Pros

Ready made software is built based on the general needs of every software which might not be the perfect fit for your work.

Sometimes, every business needs their own softwares to fix the specific issues of their business.

Customised software is a famous choice for all the companies who need custom solutions. Let’s check out some great pros of getting a customised software built.

1) Customised features 

A readymade solution may not have features that are suitable for your business requirements if you buy one.

Getting a custom solution developed will make sure that your software is customised according to your company’s requirement.

Actually, during this process, you may get a lot of opportunities to optimise your procedures, which results in a higher productivity level of your company.

There are a lot of third-party partners who will be willing to help you analyse the whole set of procedures followed in the organisation to provide you with perfectly optimised solutions.

This will enhance your work efficiency, which will make it more satisfying in terms of finance.

2) Return on your Investment

You must be thinking customised software development is a costly option in the start as it requires a lot of money but it surely pays off in the future as it will surely help in getting higher results.

Also, ready-made softwares are also expensive as compared to the features it has. 

Sometimes you may have to buy extra hardware, and expensive servers to run the software properly. The extra cost that you will be paying annually is actually the annual licence fee.

Customised software requires high investment initially but the cost becomes negligible if you see it in the future.

A detailed return on investment needs to be performed to know paying huge investment for customised software development which you will pay off in some years in respect to the licence fees in this time period and more costs in buying a ready-made solution.

3) Security Issues

The greatest advantage of a customised software solution is that complete security can be built in that software as the organisation requires. 

Hackers love to hack the famous commercially used ready-made softwares and have to look for methods through risky portions of tools to get into your systems.

If you get a customised software built, chances of hacking are less as you get your software built by your own tools and team.

4) Flexibility

A custom built software can easily be flexible.

This will help in making sure your custom solution is addressing any changes that your organisation needs. Also, features of a ready-made application stays consistent more or less and they are not able to be easily manipulated.

With ready-made software, you would have to stay patient and wait for some company to improve the features of your software to make it a bit more convenient to use.

But, this isn’t just the way things work for a custom built solution, you have some people on your team with you who can just update your software and improve the functionality of the software for you whenever you want them to according to the needs of your business.

If you are assigning your development work to some other firm, it is always a great choice to have a contract that includes maintenance and the company can flexibly make any required changes. A flexible and convenient team is all you need after you have a custom software.

5) Compatibility

There are surely a lot of softwares and tools that are getting used by your company. You might want all the softwares to be connected to one another and might have to build the interfaces which help in making data transfer from one app to another more convenient.

These features are very hard to get in a ready-made software. This can be added in a customised software though. Ready-made software may come with some options to combine with another custom solution but this might not be as smooth as it should be.

6) Easily Usable

Another benefit a custom software has is it is easy to use as it is not heavy and has only the features that your company requires.

Ready-made softwares do contain various features but they are just general according to the most common requirements of a business.

You might not even need most of these features and may just be using a few functionalities. The software tools are then heavy and hard to use for you because of this issue.

The convenient usage enhances productivity and lessens the overall cost by doing tasks which are repetitive. This would enhance your profit and reduce the cost that is further involved.

7) Competitive Benefits

Customised software is made specifically to fulfil the requirements of your business. You can get all the unique features into your software which other competitors might not have.

You have a unique software which can be your unique selling proposition and gives you a great benefit over your competitors. A ready-made software is hard and you need to fix your processes all the time.

With a customised software, you only have what you require which helps in focusing on your target audience more.

This can make sure the customers are always satisfied and that your business is running successfully in the long run.

8) Less Risks in the Future

Most of the time, companies who own the ready-made softwares just release their current software again in a better way and don’t support the older ones which you own.

Sometimes companies just fail and don’t provide any support.

These ready-made softwares are not risk-free in the long run.

This is where custom software helps. You can lead your business while not getting worried about a ready-made software that your complete business depends on. A ready-made software can not even be improved or updated in the future.

Tailor made software is supported by the company always and they can update it whenever you want it to be.

9) Better Software Support

The support from the custom software development team is better than the ready-made software one.

Mostly, constant support is included in your agreement with the development company which means you have a specific team who will be providing maintenance to your software.

This allows you to detect and fix issues quicker than the support a ready-made software has.

The resolution and response time of the development of your custom solution are quicker and you can ensure this by the SLAs in your agreement.

The control of the software support depends on you completely and not on the team.

Cons

Now that we have listed a lot of pros of customised software, let’s see what cons using a custom software has.

1) A Lot of Investment

As discussed already, a huge amount is needed for customised software development.

Even though it might be great for you eventually, investing it in the start might be immense for most people.

A proper return on investment should be performed before you decide on the customised solution.

2) Time Needed

An investment doesn’t only mean investing money, it also means investing a huge amount of time is also needed during the process of customised software development.

Even though ready made softwares will be quick, you may need years to get your custom software developed.

The company will have to spend a lot of time guiding your software developing company or your development team.

A ready-made software is always tested for defects and has been through a lot of tests of usability and can be used when you buy it.

This is not the case for custom solutions.

A customised software needs a lot of time invested in it to test the solution from the perspective of a user and the procedure might have to go through a few repetitions before getting the results you desire.

This complete amount of time you spend in all the phases of custom software development will be tough for you if you are working with a third-party team or company.

Read More: What is below the fold website? 

What Is a Customised Software Development Methodology?

A software development methodology is a sequence that a developer uses while developing a customised software. It is a kind of framework where there is a pattern followed to develop a software. The standard development process includes:

• Consulting.
• Planning.
• Designing.
• Architecture.
• Coding. 
• Implementing.
• Testing.
• Launching.

Picking the correct methodology is really important when you start to develop a customised software. The system and style of development you pick has an effect on the success of the development project. But, it depends on the size of the team, organisation, and product goals as well. A properly defined methodology has a lot to offer including: 

• Better estimation
• Providing stable systems
• Keeping the customer updated
• Building a clear understanding of the upcoming task
• Knowing risks earlier
• Giving ample time to make changes

The main benefit of choosing the correct model is to have an effective and smoothly working development process. But, every methodology has its own features, pros, and cons which we have discussed in another blog.

10 Best Customised Software Development Methodologies

There are 10 total types of SDLC Models. They are as following:

1- Waterfall Model

2- Agile Model

3- Spiral Model

4- Big Bang Model

5- Iterative Model

6- V-shaped Model

7- Rapid Application Development Model

8- Evolutionary Prototype Model

9- Capability Maturity Model

10- DevOps Model

If you want to get a detailed look at these types of SDLC, you can check out our articles on that.

Want to Develop Customised Software for Your Enterprise Business?

Our team of experienced developers have built customised softwares for clients with the help of advanced technologies, like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. 

What Is the Cost of Building Customised Software?

The cost of building customised software can be different based on its difficulty level. If a simple customised solution takes around 800 to 4000 hours, a difficult one might take upto 4500 to 10000 hours. 

This is a primary formula that is used to find the cost of a customised software development. 

The time needed to develop a customised software x Developer’s hourly payment = Overall cost of customised software.

For example, if a developer charges 40$ per hour, the total software cost would be:

Simple software: 800 to 4000 hours x 40$ = 32,000$ – 1,60,000$

Complex Software: 4500 to 10000 hours x 40$ = $1,80,000 – $4,00,000

Why Is Customised Software Development Required?

Being a business owner, there must be a lot of unique business goals that you are willing to achieve. But, the readymade solution doesn’t really contain all the features that your business needs.

But, with the constant changes and trends in the latest technology, the demands of the market have been changing. So, you cannot depend on just a readymade solution. In this situation, it becomes essential to go ahead with a customised software for achieving the required goals of your business. But, are you even aware of the difference between a customised software and a ready-made software?

The following bullet points will provide a better idea to learn about both kinds of softwares.

Customised Software:

• Can be fully customised.
• Only the features that are needed are added.
• Lifetime support.
• Different overall cost based on the requirements.
• Offers ease of use.
• The software can easily be upgraded.

Readymade Software Solution

• The software might not meet the criteria of your business.
• Best practices have been used.
• Not sure if they can be customised.
• Fixed overall cost.
• Easy to use and install.

Benefits of a Customised Software

The customised software includes the required and needed tools and features of your business. It is one of the most reliable solutions to upgrade your software according to the needs of your business. Let’s now see how a customised software is beneficial for your business.

1) Better Integration

• The process of integration with old systems is convenient.
• New software is well suited with the current software system.
• Functionalities can be increased to optimise the procedure.

2) Addresses the Needs of Your Business

• You can choose custom functionalities and features that can solve issues and challenges related to your business.

3) Less Cost & Better Performance

• Least training cost required or sometimes no cost is required.
• You can add more features whenever you need them.
• The exact features of your software can enhance the productivity of your employees that helps in saving time.

4) Business Safety and Security

• Least chance of cracking your software’s code as it’s like making efforts for a whole new software.
• Chooses the best technologies to make sure the data doesn’t get hacked or leaked.

5) Helps You Focus on Main Business Areas

• Automate your complicated work and help in focusing on the main parts of your business. 
• Helps you in bringing innovation in your services to make sure your customers are satisfied.
• Makes your business procedures easy and efficient.

If you still want to know the answers to some of the questions related to a customised software, then you can go to the FAQ section down below.

Conclusion

With the help of this blog, we hope you have now learned the vital steps of creating a customised software for the unique needs of your business. Also, we have a separate blog on the best software development models that can be used to build your own customised software. These models are unique and have their separate features, pros, and cons, so always make sure to choose the best model that is perfect according to your requirements.

If you have any other questions about building a customised software or you are willing to get a customised software developed for your business, just get in touch with our experienced team of developers. 

You can contact us here and one of our representatives will reach you back shortly. 

FAQs

What is customised software with examples?

customised software is mainly developed to fulfil the special needs of an organisation or a customer. It is built by keeping the demands and requirements of your customer in mind. Here are some of the top organisations that have been using customised softwares to thrive in their specific industry.

• Monster Movers – GPA Tracker Application
• BlackBerry – Issue Tracking Application
• Life Support Systems – Performance Tracking App

What are the main development stages?

• Identify your business challenges.
• Analyse your requirements.
• Hire a software development company.
• Development and testing
• Deployment and maintenance

What are the types of customised software?

• Operations Management Software
• Ecommerce Software
• Enterprise Resource Planning Software
• Content Management Systems (CMS)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

What are the examples of custom made bespoke software?

• Video streaming services
• Delivery service software
• Streaming services
• customised software for banking
• Voice recognition services

What are system software examples?

System software works as a foundation for other softwares. Operating systems like Linux, Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Android are some examples of system software. Also the computational scientific software, search engines, game engines, software as a service application, and industrial automation are known as system softwares.

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