By: Real Business Magazine
Phil
Lenton, managing director of Compsoft, looks at the advantages of bespoke IT systems for fast-growth SMEs.
You’ve based your business on a unique idea; you’ve found a niche where your products or services are in huge demand because there is nothing else that competes. As a result, you are experiencing an incredible rise in demand - and it’s all you can do just to keep up.
As far as IT is concerned, your business may have started with a very simple proprietary system which was perfectly adequate at the time. It did the basics very well: customer information, sales records, etc.
Now, however, your growth requires new staff who need access to all that knowledge and information; you have many more customers who have to be dealt with in a more systematic way; you may have investors who demand rigorous reporting; and you are striving to punch above your weight so that you can compete with larger companies.
In short, you can no longer rely on the ad hoc systems of the past to support your business and to look professional to the outside world.
For any SME with an unusual business proposition, bespoke could be the key to maintaining that competitive edge. With an individually-designed solution, the unique processes which made your business a success in the first place can be systemised and incorporated.
You can take advantage of today’s powerful development tools, such as Microsoft .NET, and exploit them in the best way for your business. In short, you keep whatever it was that made you different and build the IT system around that, rather than changing what you do to suit inflexible technology.
With a bespoke IT solution, you are in charge of the direction of that system. It should mirror the unique way you work: how you serve your customers; how you communicate internally; how you interact with suppliers, partners and remote staff.
And you can plan for the future and ensure the system supports those plans: more features and capabilities can be added over time to match the growth of your business. In particular, you can stay ahead of your competitors by building in the flexibility of accommodating new products or services.
How do you go about it?
Once you’ve chosen the specialist partner who is going to design and implement the system with you, the first step is to identify what it needs to cover and what it doesn’t – in other words, what areas could still be adequately supported by off-the-shelf products.
You must then draw up your plans for the business - both immediately and in the future. How and when are you likely to expand? What new products or services might come on stream? What are the pinchpoints which are hindering growth at the moment? What are your HR plans?
How are you likely to work: do you need to think about remote workers; depots or branches; supplier relationships; new ways of interacting with customers or partners? All of this can be incorporated into your new bespoke system, which should truly underpin the unique way you work now and how you plan to work in the future.
Most companies would expect an IT system to last for three to five years. But with a bespoke system, as long as you invest time and thought at the planning stage, it can serve you far longer than an off-the-shelf system.
If it’s designed with your specific expansion plans in mind, it can continue to perform - and to support your success and growth - far longer than a conventional IT system.