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Small companies from the Airline and eCommerce industries that decide to carry out digital transformations face a common dilemma: whether to use slightly cheaper off-the-shelf solutions or to invest in dedicated, custom-built solutions that are fully designed to meet their particular needs. It's a strategic and sometimes tricky choice..
In the market, many companies are offering ready-made solutions. Not as many offer the facility to customise bits and pieces of the standardised software. That means everyone gets the same thing. Both you and your direct competitors have access to the same pool of standardised solutions. So, it is likely that several of you end up with the same software, which inevitably takes away the possibility of possessing a technological edge. Unless…it is possible to customise parts of this standardised solution to better fit the specific needs of your business and your competitors’ respective businesses. This could bring about several benefits:
▪ Maintaining your business processes instead of having to mirror the popular 80% that a standardised system delivers.
▪ Maintaining your brand image instead of operating on externally branded software.
▪ Custom-designed frontends instead of using restrictive white labels that fail to capture your customer’s journey.
▪ Custom-tailored search and booking flow instead of adapting to the solution’s way of doing things.
▪ Third-party integrations to cover all of your company’s needs and existing connectivity to external systems.
▪ Customised functionalities to help you macro/micro manage your business with optimum automation.
The only perceived drawback here would be associated costs. Customisation doesn’t come cheap. But the initial investment brings back a much larger, consistent return. The rewards far outweigh the extra money. The investment in customisation will help grow your bottom line exponentially. A good way forward here is to space the developments out, starting with assigning priorities to each custom development, ideally ending up with a development roadmap that helps you deliver according to your business plans and spend incrementally and within the limitations of your company’s cash flow or budget.
Smart IT companies today strive to mimic the customers’ buying processes and each company’s buying cycle, quickly identifying bottlenecks and resource and budget limitations. Building relationships with customers over the years allows us to share all the great success stories we’ve been able to be a part of. We believe in transparent business models that allow us to grow when our clients grow. The IT industry has matured from the once hit-and-run stage show it used to be, at least in most parts of the world.