If you are running your own business, it is highly likely you are using a central software solution to manage your business: clients, employees, contracts, and so much more. These types of software solutions are expensive, and the decision to get rid of them can be extremely difficult. There are a lot of costs involved: the cost of the new software solution you’re going to install, the cost of training your employees, the cost of decreased productivity until your business gets used to the new software solution are just a few of the issues you’ll be facing. The purpose of this article is to help you get a handle on the situations where it is more advantageous to replace the old software solution completely and the situations where it’d be much better to develop solutions to get around the limitations of the current software solution without replacing it.
Is It Possible to Extend The Current Software Solution’s Functionality?
No matter how old a software solution is, if it has been designed with growth in mind, there’s always the chance you can extend its functionality and make it align with your business’s new requirements. You can start by contacting the software development agency responsible for the software solution and ask them about a possible extension to its functionality.
Of course, in most cases, they’ll likely say it is possible, but you have to dig deeper and carefully analyze the cost and benefits of the extension:
- If the software solution is really old, and you require a lot of tinkering and extensions, it is likely it will cost a .lot, and not to mention the fact that the new features will feel more unnatural and will be prone to more bugs and errors.
- If you are missing just a few functionalities that can reasonably be added to the software solution, it is highly likely the cost will be low, and you won’t have any problems operating the new features.
Can You Come Up with a Work-Around?
Perhaps you need to approach the problem from a different perspective – how hard is it to adapt your new business functionalities and processes to the existing software framework? Although it might seem counterintuitive to accommodate the software solution instead of the other way around, when you calculate all of the costs extension or replacement might entail, it doesn’t look so unattractive anymore.
Although it is important to consider how inefficient the service will be if you adapt it to the software solution, and how much profit and customer satisfaction you might lose because of it. If the software solution is too old and you’ve outgrown it, sticking to it will only bog down your business further and prevent growth.
You can also try to invest in other areas of your business in a more cost-effective way rather than straight up paying for a new software solution. For example, investing in marketing effectively can help your brand and make many more customers recognize and do business with you, counteracting any loss from the old software system. However, you need to be careful about how you approach marketing, as it is a very dynamic field and there’s a high chance of you misusing the allocated fund if you’re not careful. One of the cheapest ways you can get good results is by hiring international SEO companies in London, Silicon Valley, New Delhi, and elsewhere, where you can find a good marketing agency that has experience managing marketing campaigns for companies in your business sector.
Long-term Planning
One of the harder things to estimate is the long-term returns in investing in a new bespoke software solution – due to the harsh near-term costs of adoption and training, most business owners shudder to think about completely replacing the system because gauging long term returns requires astuteness and far-sightedness:
Accurately assessing your business sector and growth potential and then calculating what is the opportunity cost of not adopting the new software solution culminating in lower profits and hindrance in adopting the latest industry standard techniques and technologies. Although, due to the dynamism of the economy, this is extremely hard to predict and measure, so it takes a leap of faith of sorts to decide whether it’ll be profitable in the long run to adopt a new software solution.
If your outlook is positive, and you think there’s ample opportunity for your business to grow and expand in the next couple of years, you’ll probably welcome a new software solution that responds more effectively to your business’s changing needs and requirements. On the other hand, if you think the economic outlook is grim and your business will have a hard time just staying afloat much less thrive, there is little reason to augment the problems by adopting a new software solution with many new features that you might not even get to use.
