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At certain stages of its development, every business encounters the challenge of becoming more productive and profitable. Moreover, in the current fast-changing and highly competitive world, enterprises should always aim to grow further to protect their market share.
Adopting business automation is a strategy to improve your business performance, maximize the results from your employees’ efforts, and reduce mistakes. The impact of software development for business automation may vary and touch upon different aspects of your processes. However, it’s always a step forward.
In this article, we describe business process automation through software product development to shift goalposts and help you achieve business objectives you could only dream of before.
The Value of Business Automation Software Development
We would say that business process automation (BPA) is an umbrella term that unites different technologies that companies may leverage. However, there is no single protocol for implementing all automation. To gain the most from this process, every company should adopt a custom approach: evaluate their current workflow, and detect areas where implementing automation technologies will bring the most value.
At the same time, it’s important to remember that not every process can be automated. Even with artificial intelligence growing capacities exponentially day after day, humans can still complete some tasks better and more precisely than technologies.
Business automation, at its core, is designed to optimize the workflow, delegate everything possible to machines and software. Consequently, it relieves employees from repetitive tasks, redirecting their attention and efforts to more strategic, essential goals and tasks.
The main reasons for carrying out business automation are always tied to profits. Whether it helps to reduce overhead and increase profit margin, improve employee productivity or increase manufacturing capacities, it leads to better financial results.
Among more concrete resulting improvements of business automation software development that are worth mentioning are:
- boost in productivity of your employees;
- improved customer experience;
- reduced amount of mistakes in production and supply chain;
- reduced amount of mistakes in order processing, and hence, lower product return/refund rate;
- enablement of a better data-driven environment;
- higher visibility of your assets, stock/inventory;
- enhanced prospecting.
The level of automation can reach different gradations:
- workflow automation that unites data storage and data exchange between employees on one single platform;
- robotic process automation, also known as RPA, when specific software or bots are used to automate repetitive tasks; in this case, the software is only designed to repeat the same tasks by following certain rules;
- advanced automation implies the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML); here, the AI-powered software may evaluate the unique situation itself and determine the best solution or approach for the situation without a need for human involvement.
No matter what type of custom software development for business automation you choose, it’s an investment in your company. And like any good investment, it will not only recoup the costs but also certainly pay off and bring profits from a long-term perspective.
Delivering Business Automation ROI
Business automation is a tool that will springboard your business to the next level. This is clear and obvious, but you will obviously need to bring some more arguments to the board of directors to make it happen. However, when done right, it can yield significant ROI (return on investment), in some cases even up to 400 percent.
Source: Salesforce
To calculate ROI of custom software development for business automation and get some realistic numbers to operate, you can use this formula:
ROI = (Gain from the investment – the cost of investment) / the cost of investment
But a question arises when you try to evaluate the gain from investment in measurable numbers. Some experts talk about hard ROI (a quantitative financial indicator that with some efforts, you will be able to count) and soft ROI (an indicator that represents qualitative changes in your work environment and is difficult to convert into financial results). Both hard and soft ROI brings benefits for your business, but to measure them, you need to contemplate the various effects of business automation.
Custom Software Development for Business Automation
So, at this point, the impact of business automation should be clear, and you may want to implement it to some extent. Business automation software development is a logical step in 2022. Depending on what aspects of your processes are a priority or most suitable for automation, you can choose the most appropriate software piece.
Under the “automation software”, companies imply different types of systems, and the most common ones include:
- enterprise resource planning (ERP);
- customer relationship management (CRM);
- order management systems;
- inventory management systems;
- etc.
All of them serve to automate the flow and streamline certain processes. The current market of ready-made solutions offers a lot of solutions at different forms and prices, so it’s quite easy to plug-in automation software within a few days. However, if you are aiming for real results and high ROI, ready-made software won’t be the best match.
The main downside of ready-made software is the lack of customization and agility. Most likely, you will get a hold of a narrow set of functions that will give you the opportunity to automate your processes on a certain level, to a certain extent. Still, almost always, the ready-made system will have bottlenecks in its functionality that won’t be 100 percent catered to your needs and will restrict your automation scalability potential.
To overcome this challenge, you will need to resort to custom software development for business automation and create a system that at its core is designed specifically for your company.
You may worry that while switching to the new custom solutions, you may lose your already generated data and thereby block operational processes. However, it’s possible to save and relocate valuable data to the new system.
We have gone through our share of business automation software development, and here are some of our most distinctive success cases.
Our Success Cases of Software Product Development for Business Automation
Enterprise Resource Planning System for Jet Brokerage Company
Soljets works in the field of jet brokerage and acquisition. At some point in its development, the company leaders understood that the industry is in crucial need of transformation, adopting modern technological solutions instead of an old-school approach to business operations through scattered Excel reports. The company decided to develop a system that would function as a united space for data collection, exchange, and processing.
The development itself has taken over 18 months, and the client admits that the exact extent of the final benefit of the software product development for business automation was difficult to assess at this stage, but the results exceeded expectations.
2 years after the initial release, the company has grown about 2 or 3- fold in terms of revenue after the deployment of the Altamira-developed ERP system.
Order Management System for Fleet Outfitting Provider
Our client provides and installs special parts on government agencies’ vehicles (law enforcement, fire department, etc.) and commercial fleets. The process to obtain the necessary parts (gathering requirements from the end-customer, collecting necessary parts from storage) was cumbersome and demanded manual data entry and processing by employees.
The company requested web development services of a system that would connect customers and the company’s staff, automate the ordering, and its fulfillment. We initiated the development from the Discovery Stage: we started from mock-ups, then proceeded with minimal functionality. But during our whole cooperation, the system has expanded to other additional modules that started to complement one another.
As a result, the company was able to increase its productivity and relieve employees from repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
Construction Management System Leo for Manufacturer of Concrete Material
Our client is a manufacturer of architectural cast stone masonry and architectural precast masonry products. Almost every order they receive is custom, so it demands thorough estimation and processing. For 10 years, our client was trying to leverage ready-made solutions to automate this workflow and even initiated business automation software development. However, the previous efforts only left specifications and not a software piece.
Luckily, our cooperation has resulted in self-sufficient software that was completed in only 6 months. The LEO system provides full lifecycle tracking of every project, automates repetitive data entry and scheduling. The system was designed by our business automation software developers to reduce the workload on employees, increase their productivity and simultaneously decrease errors.
Highrise Property Management System
Our client is an expediting and architectural firm, and one of their main services is monitoring the statuses of different notices or violations that have been incurred by the owners of properties.
The company’s goal was to create a system that would automatically collect data on property violations and permits from necessary resources and notify property owners accordingly.
After the release, our client was able to increase the speed of detecting and reacting to property owners’ matters faster than previously, reducing the number of monitoring errors. The company uses it as a product aimed to make the lives of property owners easier and converted it into an additional revenue source.
Altamira as a Top Business Automation Software Development Company
For 10 years, we’ve been helping businesses from different domains grow and scale-up. By cooperating with us, you will benefit not only from business automation software development services, but from the:
- our extensive knowledge base in custom software development for business automation;
- a high level of ownership for the development results from our side;
- a team of experienced business automation software developers;
- quick kick-off;
- transparent budgeting;
- established communication system;
- flexible pricing and cooperation conditions (full-cycle development, team extension, etc.).
We are ready to cover your business automation software development fully, from gathering the first specifications to the final deployment.
For successful business automation software development, you will need a development team that consists of the following members:
- software architect;
- business analyst;
- front-end developers;
- back-end developers;
- mobile developers (in case you need a mobile version of the system);
- UI/UX designer;
- DevOps specialist.
The quantity and seniority of the business automation software developers depend on the difficulty and scope of the project. Hence, we evaluate every project separately and provide detailed and clear estimations to predict the price and timeline of the development. On average, the development of business automation software takes at least 6 months with a monthly check of $50,000.
In Conclusion
Business automation software development is a point of growth for any company. The process of automation is a clear pathway to increasing the profitability of your company in different ways. However, to get the maximum results you should focus on long-term advantages and strategic goals instead of just embracing new types of software just for the sake of technologies. Partner up with reliable business automation software development company which will help you determine the best strategy for this task.
