Recently, a field service enterprise was working with a transportation business whose goal was to grow from 500 to 1500 drivers without an increase in their back-end staff along with boosted productivity.
Their biggest obstacle to achieving this goal was that all back-end work was still completed manually. Drivers were supposed to collect customer information, and payment details and manually track their own hours. The information was sent back to the head office in the form of a call to have it manually entered into their accounting books. Clearly, This was time-consuming and inefficient.
A simple software development project overhauled this workflow. The field service company gave drivers tablets pre-loaded with custom software that:
- captured customer info
- tracked drivers’ hours on the road
This information was then sent to the accounting team and automatically synced with their system. This simple yet intuitive automation project helped the company meet its business objective of increased productivity while giving the company insight into data at the frontline, opening avenues for further optimizations.
Despite software development showing remarkable commercial benefits in different business domains, there remain countless instances where organizations are running operations that are being managed by loosely coupled processes and systems that result in unorganized transactions.
A survey says that the decision-makers in the U.S. and U.K. believe that by the end of 2022, most of the business processes will be automated. The study revealed that, on average, a business process is subject to 59% of software development.
That said, let us understand how software development applications can meet modern business needs and streamline processes from months to even hours!
Why Is Software Development Important?
The ultimate aim of software development is to lessen the burden of your valuable human resources and focus on key business areas requiring a high degree of human commitment.
This means you must develop a customized business process management strategy, also known as a workflow solutions strategy, for your business. It means all your data, tasks, and documents get automatically stored or assigned to the right people at the right time. When you successfully implement a software development strategy, you can effectively avoid passive process cycles, rework, communication gaps, and much more.
Benefits of Software Development
Software maintenance is necessary to signifies efficiency and standardization. It offers many business benefits, like higher productivity, low operation costs, increased revenues, and more reliable customer service.
1. Customer Satisfaction
You can increase customer satisfaction and evolve better business relationships with your suppliers and partners because you have a better and improved business process for taking care of your day-to-day operations.
2. Cost-Effective
With automation, you can quickly reduce costs and increase your profit margins. All you have to do is identify the processes that don’t require human intervention and are just a series of straightforward procedures with predictable outcomes.
3. System Integration
One of the most significant benefits of software development is you can leverage it with both legacy systems and newer applications under one single interface of the enterprise. What’s more, it also encompasses web application development.
This integration can be done between different businesses with minimal use of coding through a centralized command console supervising the whole workflow. To reap maximum benefits from process automation, you must deploy them in your business’s cross-functional environments so that everyone in the organization is enabled to interact with the system.
4. Big Data Management
It is essential that you are agile in gathering exhaustive Big Data that helps in better management and provides useful insights into a growing business. Once the data is captured in the system, it is integrated with a digital database for accurate data management and indexing purposes. All this data gathering might be overwhelming if handled manually. This is one of the most prominent software development life cycle methodologies.
5. Inventory Management
Inventory Management is vital for many businesses, but unfortunately, it is also one of the most undermined business operations riddled with inefficiencies. Small companies especially assume that they can take stock of their inventory with the help of a simple spreadsheet or a notepad.
6. Fast and Efficient
A report revealed that for every $1 billion invested in the U.S., $122 million was wasted because of project management inefficiency. With workflow automation solutions of software development services making inroads in the last couple of years, businesses are turning over a new leaf.
Software development can be useful in employee engagement and the onboarding process. This ensures that your team experiences a smooth transition to the next stage, gets a status update on the overall process and ensures only relevant people are involved in the transition.
Interestingly, with all the tangible benefits and straightforward examples, businesses are struggling with digitizing and automating their business processes. The main reason is that many organizations are still coming shortly when addressing their main operational aspects. And some of those who have been able to do it are handling their automation processes in a silo or like automation islands within their legacy environments.
Conclusion
It is important to understand that once you’ve decided to build software for your business, you should consider every aspect through the automation lens. By partnering with a software development company, your business can stay focused on core business aspects.
The ideal partner will understand your business needs, study their current environment, and create a roadmap using our software expertise to restructure and automate processes and workflows with a focus on specific business outcomes.
We trust that this article will prove informative. Until next time, happy developing!
