System development

Wanting things your own way is not a reason to build. The reason is rules an off-the-shelf product cannot express: a case that has to trigger a payment in another system, hours that have to become invoice data according to your particular contract, an approval chain that depends on both the amount and the customer. If an off-the-shelf product covers your process, we will tell you to buy it, and would rather help connect it to everything else.

When is a system of your own worth building?

When the customisations of the off-the-shelf product start becoming a system in their own right, just one you do not own. Do the sums: how many times a month is the task done, how long does it take, and what did the mistakes in it cost last year? Set that against what it costs to build a system of your own and then own it, maintenance included. The exceptions, the connections to other systems and who will maintain it decide the size of the build more than the number of screens.

If we build, we do it in parts that reach real users early. The first part is a whole flow, not a finished screen: hours that are reported, approved by the right person and turned into data an invoice can be created from. An interface that cannot be used with a keyboard or a screen reader is something we review and fix too, in the components where the problem sits.

What to bring to a first conversation

A real flow as it works today, and a few examples of where it breaks. How many invoices, timesheets or cases a month we are talking about. Which systems the new one has to talk to, and who decides, corrects and approves. If you have looked at an off-the-shelf product, we want to know where it fell short.

The first thing we want to agree on is not a requirements specification but two decisions: whether a system of your own is worth building, and if so, which flow to build first. Get in touch, and we will start with the flow.