TMI / COMPARISONS
CUSTOM SOFTWARE
VS ERP.
Short answer. An ERP buys a standard answer to problems most companies share, and should be the default for anything standard. Custom software is for the part of the business that is genuinely specific, where no vendor has built for the way you work. Most companies need an ERP and a small amount of custom, not a choice between them.
WHAT EACH ONE
ACTUALLY IS.
CUSTOM SOFTWARE
Custom software is built for one company's actual process rather than configured towards it. Its advantage is fit: it can match the way the work genuinely happens, including the parts that are unusual precisely because they are the company's advantage.
Its costs are real and ongoing. Someone has to maintain it, it has no community behind it, and a badly specified build produces an expensive version of the problem it was meant to solve.
ERP
An ERP is a system of record that encodes how a category of businesses generally operates. Its advantage is that the thinking has been done, by a vendor, across thousands of implementations, and you get finance, inventory and operations in one place with a support contract behind them.
Its cost is fit. The further your process sits from the vendor's model, the more configuration, workaround and resentment the implementation generates.
CUSTOM SOFTWARE
WHEN…
/ERP
WHEN…
CHOOSE CUSTOM SOFTWARE
- The process is a genuine differentiator rather than an inherited habit
- No vendor serves this niche, or the ones that do are plainly built for someone else
- A small tool on top of existing systems would remove the constraint
- The company has a system of record already and needs it reached, not replaced
CHOOSE ERP
- The company has outgrown spreadsheets and has no system of record at all
- Finance, inventory and operations are genuinely disconnected
- The process is ordinary for the industry, whatever it feels like from inside
- There is appetite to change how the company works to match a proven model
Neither column is a sales argument. Both appear on this page because both are correct somewhere, and a comparison in which one side never wins is an advertisement.
HOW TO DECIDE
THREE QUESTIONS
THAT SETTLE IT.
- 01
Is this process the reason customers choose you?
If yes, think hard before configuring it away. If no, take the package's answer and spend the money elsewhere. - 02
Has anyone checked whether the current system already does this?
An unreasonable amount of custom development replaces a module the company already owns and nobody has opened. - 03
Who maintains it in three years?
This question kills more custom builds than cost does, and it should be answered before the first line is written rather than after.
TMI builds custom software and will argue against it where a package is the better buy. More often than either, the audit finds the answer is neither: the systems the company already pays for have never been connected, and the integration costs a fraction of both.
STILL NOT SURE WHICH