When your business stands out from the rest, why should you use a standard ERP solution? Ideally, your ERP solution should be customized so that it suits your specific business needs.
Do you often find yourself adjusting your workflow to suit your ERP solution when it should be the other way round? The good news is that you can customize Vault ERP to suit your needs and requirements. You no longer have to tweak your operations to suit your ERP but instead make the ERP fit your needs.
For starters, Vault ERP is the proprietary ERP software from Rare Crew. It’s also the go-to solution for various departments including HR, project management, finance, sales, operations, and more.
Before we delve deeper into Vault’s customization, let’s brush up on the basics and see why businesses need customized solutions.
Why do businesses need customized solutions?
Custom software solutions ensure that the software is written to consider the broader vision and future roadmap specific to your business requirements. Let’s have a look at a few of the reasons why businesses opt for customized solutions.
Highly cost-effective
Although getting a customized solution for your business is far from being cost-effective at first, it proves to be affordable in the long run. You can design the features as per your requirements and add more depending on whether or not your needs change. You get to test the changes made and gather feedback from your stakeholders. This ensures everyone is on the same page regarding the product.
Scalability
If you’re a growing business, you might not need anything advanced and super complex on day one. However, you may have some intricate requirements a few years down the line. That’s when custom software development meets you in the middle by providing incomparable scalability. You can choose to build upon your basic software solution as your business grows. This way, you no longer have to commit to something you don’t require.
Highly secure
Readymade software solutions are easy to target. This is because the same code powers them, and if hackers can get into one software, cracking others becomes an easy task. Custom software that’s specifically designed for enterprises offers better security. Additionally, custom software experts also know how to add an extra layer of protection through encryption.
Read on: Why your business needs an ERP in 2021
Does your business need a customized solution?
Now that you have an idea of the importance of customized solutions, you now need to determine if they’re the right fit for you. Here’s a quick checklist that’ll help you test the water:
- Do you need to change your processes to suit the ERP?
- Do you wish to integrate the tools with other systems? Read on: Introduction to Vault’s integrations
- Are your vendors, employees, and customers facing challenges using the current software?
- Is ease of use one of the important reasons for getting an ERP solution?
- Do you wish to integrate multiple pieces of software into one?
If the answer to most of these questions is yes, then you need a custom ERP solution for your company.
What is ERP customization?
Although there’s a range of off-the-shelf ERP solutions available to meet your requirements, more often than not they cannot satisfy the business’s niche particularities. That’s when businesses choose to get their software customized from a specialized development company like ours.
A custom-built ERP solution lets you incorporate unique features that are specific to your business. Thus, a customized ERP is a software solution tailored to help you meet your business goals and processes.
However, the entire ERP customization is a comprehensive process that we’ll discuss in the next section.
ERP customization process
When customizing an ERP, it’s necessary to ensure that any newly added functionalities don’t break the existing ones. Therefore, the entire ERP customization process is comprehensive and involves the following steps:
1. Collecting requirements
First things first, the ERP customization process begins by gathering requirements. Think of all the features and functionalities that you want to have in your ERP. Alternatively, you can explain the different purposes that your ERP software should be able to fulfil.
2. Analysis of the client’s needs
Once the requirements are laid out, developers analyze the client’s needs. A gap analysis determines the gap between the features already existing in the ERP and the ones asked for.
3. Feasibility study
A feasibility study is conducted to review if the requested modifications can be achieved. The requested customization shouldn’t compromise the overall performance of the ERP and shouldn’t break the existing functionalities of the platform.
4. Estimation
Once the feasibility study is conducted, the estimated cost is calculated based on the gauged amount of work.
5. Customer approval
All the feedback comprising of the attainable features and the estimated cost is then shared with the customer for their approval. Finally, any changes, if needed, are made to the requirements and the budget is adjusted accordingly.
6. Development
When all the stakeholders involved are on the same page, the development phase is triggered. This is when the actual development to customize the ERP solution starts.
7. Testing
Next, rigorous testing is conducted to ensure that the customized ERP solution meets the requirements.
8. Delivery
Finally, the thoroughly tested modules are delivered to you.
Pros and cons of custom ERP software
In order to help you make the right choice, let’s look at some of the pros and cons of custom ERP software.
Pros
Exercise complete control over your product
Since the ERP is customized to your needs and requirements, you can exercise complete control over the software and tailor it to your needs.
Achieve the required flexibility
You can easily pull out a particular feature and add another striking functionality with custom ERP solutions.
Enjoy a competitive advantage by seeing the bigger picture
Strategically customized ERP solutions let you see the bigger picture and track where all the data is coming from. This provides you with a holistic view of your entire business, enabling you to make better decisions.
Own your software
When you use off-the-shelf software, the license belongs to the software company. However, when you use custom-built software, that license belongs to you and allows you to use the solution seamlessly.
Scale-up and down as needed
Customized ERP solutions provide you with much-needed scalability. You can scale up the software as your organization grows or scale down if things aren’t going right.
Cons
Over-customization can make you miss the original features
Over-customization could rule out some of the original features of the ERP. Often, businesses add so many personalized attributes that the original software becomes unrecognizable and loses its purpose.
Could introduce bugs and break some functionalities
If ERPs aren’t customized appropriately, developers could introduce bugs which could break various functionalities. This is why it’s highly recommended to choose a reliable development team for customization jobs.
Could involve high upfront costs
Customizing an ERP solution involves additional costs. However, it’s worth every penny when you consider the flexibility and usefulness it offers.
Read on: Transform your business to the digital age
Difference between customization and configuration
There’s a stark difference between ERP customization and configuration. ERP configuration is the process where a basic systems functions and components are optimized for easy integration with the existing system environment. This could include tasks like setting up language and time zone preferences or customizing the page layout.
On the other hand, ERP customization is the process of modifying the solution on a broader scale to meet the business and company requirements. For example, this could involve enhancing the existing features, adding task management processes, and so on.
How Rare Crew fulfills your business goals related to customization
Vault is the in-house ERP solution offered by Rare Crew. We provide extensive Vault customization services consisting of Vault installation, easy implementation of customized Vault modules, post-implementation support, and much more. We’ll walk with you through every step of the process to ensure that Vault delivers exactly what your business requires. We ensure that your short-term and long-term goals are met and that the customizations are perfectly in line with your specific needs.
Our other Vault offerings
Not only do we provide customization services, but we also offer other services like implementation, integration, support and maintenance, development, migration, consulting, training, and more.
We understand that each ERP solution comes with a bit of a learning curve. Although Vault focuses on the user interface and is extremely simple to follow, we offer training services to ensure your workforce quickly become familiar with the tool.
Whether you need to customize Vault, get help with implementation, or want to train your workforce, we’ve got your back. Contact us today to learn more.