Amadeus Consulting Discusses Customization vs. Configuration Whats the Best Option for You Part Two of Two

Will it give me a competitive advantage?

Software and technology should benefit your company and give it an advantage. Whether it be better customer/client engagement, business intelligence, process efficiency, or information tracking, custom software lets you do something your competition cannot.

Custom Software

Custom Software provides you with a solution that is proprietary to you. It can give you an advantage over your competition if it is more efficient, powerful, or better targeted to give you exactly what you need.

Custom Software can also be an advantage to you if it:

Solves a problem nobody else has effectively solved

Is easier to use

Integrates with other software that your business uses

Expands the capabilities of existing software

Can be resold as a proprietary product or solution

A custom software solution provides you with something that nobody else has. Every business can potentially purchase premade and configurable software to solve a need within a business. However, as discussed above, pre-boxed software does not always do everything you need. Custom solutions are built around solving specific needs, and give you something that no other competitor has.

Custom software is also a viable solution to replace outgrown pre-boxed software. For example, using Microsoft Excel to do product or inventory management, at some point your business will outgrow it. When it does, you can try to find prepackaged software that can do what you need, or you can build a custom system that automates tracking and inventory.

Many companies also find that they can benefit by building custom additions to existing products. For example, the popular sales tracking software called Salesforce allows the addition of custom software elements, which can provide an additional layer of benefit to a company by integrating with other products, and providing more targeted analysis.

Custom software additions are common since they tend to be cheaper than fully custom-built software, but still provide many of the benefits of fully custom software. As always, each situation and need is different, so it is impossible to label on choice as always better than the other, but each has advantages.

Configurable Software

For normal business operations and management, out-of-the-box software is often a very good choice, and provides a clear benefit over custom built software.

This is because business operations like HR, accounting, sales tracking, etc, are fairly standard across all businesses which mean that standard software will address the most common needs. The software can also be configured to better utilize features specific to you.

By doing this, a competitive advantage is achieved through cost savings and using a familiar standardized system. This may reduce training time, and increase the number of potential new employees who are already familiar with your software.