An in-depth case study on how a software

product benefitted a specific company

INDUSTRY SPECIFIC SOFTWARE

Many businesses that are just starting out will be cost-conscious when it comes to
managing their financials. Their goal is to maximize ROI any way possible, and
one way includes finding a low-cost software that can simply “get the job done”.
This could include recording financials via spreadsheets or picking one of the
many advertised small business accounting software solutions on the market.
Admittedly these solutions are attractive to new business because of their cost.
But are they good long-term fits?
There are many ways automation can help save your company money, and
utilizing software to automate your accounting processes is the first step.
When you decide on what software you want, do you pick something more popular
with a large install base, or do you pick something more industry specific?
Sure, software with a large install base has its advantages. Given the popularity of
the program, any new staff you hire may have experience with the software, which
could eliminate training costs.
You also may find comfort in the number of reviews and public opinion of the
software, allowing you to get a good grasp as to the advantages and disadvantages
before buying.
Common accounting software components include core accounting, payroll, billing
& invoicing, fixed asset management, and inventory. But what if your needs
extend beyond that? Do you try to handle this additional need manually? Do you
find a secondary software to work alongside your existing accounting solution?
Source
 If you had an industry-specific solution to begin with, you may have been able to
avoid needing a new solution altogether.
 

Modules Designed For Your Industry

A major benefit of having an industry-specific software solution is functionality
modules that are relevant to your industry. This is because almost all businesses
will need the core accounting offered in any accounting software (accounts
payable, accounts receivable, and a general ledger), but typically will fall short
when it comes to industry-specific needs.

What are these industry-specific functionalities?

 Construction: Job costing and estimating
 Manufacturing: MRP
 Nonprofit: Fund Accounting
A lot of small business software may include inventory in its core package, but it
won’t be optimized for a manufacturing company.
One piece of information that greatly affect a manufacturer’s production levels is
purchasing planning and demand forecasting. This is information that an MRP (or
material resource planning) module will give you.
For-profit software works great for commercial operations, but often using one for
a nonprofit is like fitting a square peg through a round hole.
The software will talk about sales, profit, revenue… all things that a nonprofit
doesn’t necessarily deal with. One module specific to the world of nonprofits is
fund accounting, which improves allocation management of resources which have
been designated for specific uses.
Simply put, most small business software is created to appease the masses. They
don’t have the resources in order to create custom versions of their software to suit
every industries needs. If they did, they would likely need to charge more for their
software, and it would lose its primary appeal in the first place.
Most businesses starting out can “get by” on the basic functionality an industry-
neutral software offers, but will notice quickly they won’t be able to take that extra
step without being hyper-focused.

Ability To Grow Properly

As mentioned before, many small businesses will want to start with a basic
software that is tried and true in many industries. But when it times come to grow
as a company, you’ll be looking to expand on what your current software can offer
you. This may mean adding users, adding functionality, or better reporting.
Generic software is best used by smaller businesses that don’t really have the
ability to invest in software or have the adequate resources available for a proper
implementation.
Usually, these companies may hire outside accounting firms, and these firms will
suggest these more generic solutions due to their accounting staff having
familiarity with them.
While this makes the work they do for you easier, it only keeps their own interests
at heart.

An industry-specific software will offer everything you need in one program, and it
will be offered by a single company. You may purchase it only needing basic
accounting, but realize in a few months you have a need to add on some
functionalities.
The industry-specific software will allow you to do so, while a generic software
will likely force you to purchase a 3rd-party add-on, or a completely different
software altogether.
For example, as a small manufacturing company, you may have a generic
accounting software, but a desire to add on better inventory management that can
really break down the production scheduling via proper forecasting via an MRP.
You can always purchase a stand-alone option to meet that need, but you could
deal with integration issues. If you can’t transfer data properly from one system to
the other, which company do you contact for support?
Will your generic accounting software provider know the answer to a very specific
question you may have about manufacturing management?
One could argue that it’s far easier (and less of a headache) to grow as a company
by expanding functionalities with a scalable software that allows you the option to
add-on as you go.
 BENEFITS OF INDUSTRY SPECIFIC SOFTWARE

1. Expanding With Custom Software is More Cost Effective

As your company grows, you’ll need to add users, functionality, and better
reporting. With an expandable, industry specific software, like SalesChain, this will
mean flipping the on switch to added features or putting in a request to our
development staff. However, with off the shelf systems, this may mean a costly
upgrade or, worse yet, changing systems entirely.
Often users of big-box software find themselves buying additional software
products to add functionality where gaps exist. On the contrary, there have been
several instances where SalesChain users have found the need for an additional
feature, and our development staff has responded in kind by creating the feature
for them.

2. An Intentional Workflow Increases Productivity

By using software designed to meet the needs of your specific industry and, more
intimately, the needs of your business, the process of logging information in that
system can make a lot more sense. Much in the same way that there is always a
right tool for the job, there is often a software that serves any given situation
specifically. When your software developer is familiar with your industry on an
intimate level, they can provide a workflow process which makes sense within the
bounds of your industry.

3. Relevant Integrations
Many pre-packaged software products are built to communicate well with
“outside” software to fill the gaps in their own functionality. Quite often,
however, they’re built specifically to communicate with sister products in an
effort to get customers to buy other products made by the same company.
Providers put a thin veil over this practice by calling each component the “best in
class,” while ignoring the underlying problem that these are still disconnected
software products. This principal also applies to integrations to outside software
products. While big-box providers may integrate with partners with very
recognizable names, those integrations might not have all that much to do with
the day-to-day functions of your organization.

4. Industry-Specific Modules
Similar to the selection process for integrations, most small business software is
created to appease the masses. Major providers don’t allocate the development
resources in order to create custom versions of their software to suit every
industries needs. Their solution provides the most basic of functionality that will
appeal to a very wide customer base without adding any truly valuable utilities.

5. Support
With a focused software system comes a focused support staff. Support personnel
who are trained and operate in the same industry that a software serves are
much more apt to provide competent help and advice. When a service staff
member works exclusively in one industry, they solve problems pertaining to that
industry alone, and can built a valuable knowledge base much more quickly.
Representatives of an industry-specific solution are going to have a great
understanding of the day to day functions of your business and know what
specific features will benefit your business best.

DISADVANTAGES OF INDUSTRY SPECIFIC SOFTWARE

Custom software refers to a specifically designed program or application that is

built by and used in a specific organization. Custom software is usually different
from normal mass-market products and is structured independently in relation to
specifics from the organization. The idea of custom software is often employed to
enhance system efficiency with features that may be absent in the off-shelf version
of the program. This very much can be applied with research management systems
for health institutions, research facilities, hospitals, registries etc.
Though it would appear to work perfectly for a particular case (since it is designed
to support and address the specific needs of the organization involved), the use of a
custom software comes with numerous disadvantages like those outlined below;

1.Expensive

Custom software is generally a project associated with high cost and is not always
the best option to consider especially for medical and clinical research institutions.
This is because there already exist numerous cheaper canned solutions which are
capable of addressing a wide range of requirements and functions.

2.Time Consuming

A custom software’s design, setup and implementation always require a lot of time
to arrive completion. This is a major disadvantage for organizations looking for
short and immediate solutions. This particular nature of custom software increases
the probability of unforeseen complications.

3.Need for Additional Technical Proficiency

When going for custom software, there is the extra worry of needing to get
relatively high technical proficiency. It is best to consider other off-shelf options
with easier handling and management requirements especially if your organization
lacks a technically strong software team having the skill set necessary for building
and configuring the custom software. It will be very difficult to achieve efficiency
if your developers can’t be held accountable for the entire project.

4.Support and Documentation

With the use of custom software, the unavailability of the original developer for
support to the program makes it very difficult and sometimes impossible to get
others capable of updating or adding new features to the software. Also, routine
and commercial software packages usually have readily available training and
documentation resources in comparison with custom software packages. This is a
major limitation to the effective functioning of research management systems
based on custom software.

OTHER INDUSTRIES USING AWS

UNILEVER

Unilever North America, the U.S. branch of the venerable global-scale

manufacturer of food, household, and other consumer products, found
that its time-to-market (crucial in the consumer goods industry) was
being held back by the lack of standardised technology among its on-
premises IT facilities and websites.

Unilever conducted an exhaustive review of the available cloud-based

options, and finally chose to migrate to AWS, using a full range of AWS
services to support 1,700 digital marketing web properties on a
worldwide basis.

For Unilever, the advantages include increased speed of rollout for a

website (now two days, rather than the pre-AWS average of two weeks),
and the increased speed at which changes to a site or a marketing
campaign can be made. Unilever also uses AWS for comprehensive
backup and disaster recovery, and for rapid deployment of standardised
infrastructure.

GE oil & GAS

The oil and gas division of General Electric has migrated 350+

applications to AWS, cutting the average cost of ownership by over 50%,
according to their own estimate. For GE, the cloud migration process is
ongoing, with constant review of on-premises applications and services
to see which ones are the best candidates for transfer to the cloud.

The ability to monitor the use of cloud-based applications is important to

GE's IT team, since it allows them to accurately gauge expenses and
savings, to determine when services should be active (and thus billable),
and when they should be turned off.

AWS' capacity for handling large amounts of data is important to GE as

well. The oil and gas division needs to be able to process enormous
volumes of mission-critical automated pipeline inspection data. It is
using AWS technology to store and transport the data, and for data
analysis and processing, saving time and improving the quality of the
results.
KELLOGG’S

The Kellogg Company, or Kellogg’s, a familiar breakfast-table name, is a

company with a long history (founded in 1888), with worldwide
operations. For Kellogg’s (as is the case throughout the breakfast-cereal
industry), product promotions are all-important.

The Kellogg company had been relying on an on-premises database for

modelling marketing campaigns and analysing promotion and sales
data, but the system, which could run no more than a single simulation
per day, was no longer able to keep up with the company's needs.

As a replacement, Kellogg’s chose a SAP promotion planning and

simulation application. At the same time, they chose to run the SAP
application on AWS, rather than on-premises. The decision to migrate to
AWS was motivated by a number of factors, including speed and overall
capacity. (The system handles 16 TB of weekly sales data, with several
dozen marketing simulations on a weekly basis.) AWS also offered high
availability, reduced cost, and flexibility in IT planning. The combination
of SAP and AWS (with its support for SAP software) has given Kellogg’s
a significant advantage in a very competitive market.

SHELL

Like many other large businesses operating on a global scale, energy

giant Shell has taken steps to protect itself from the rising threat of
cyber attacks. In particular, the Netherlands-headquartered firm decided
to look at ways it could improve its security information and event
management solution.

To stay ahead of cyber criminals, Shell required the ability to run detailed
analysis of trends over time and continually spot vulnerabilities through
a cyberthreat hunting function. The challenge? Its SIEM solution just
didn’t have the capacity to perform these critical functionalities.

Using around 100 EC2 instances and Splunk Enterprise Security

applications, the firm has implemented a much more powerful cyber
security solution for analysing real-time and historical data. This means
Shell can protect itself from current and emerging cyber threats.
According to Shell CyberDefence manager Oskar Brink, the firm is
“finding more than twice as many events that could have resulted in
security incidents and breaches”.

EXPEDIA

As cloud and mobile technologies continue to dominate the business

landscape, lots of firms are moving away from physical data centres in
search for more sustainable and efficient alternatives.

Travel comparison website Expedia is an excellent example,

having unveiled plans to move 80% of mission-critical applications to the
cloud through AWS. The firm decided to do this after discovering that
the main reason for people leaving its website was due to error pages.
Expedia wanted customers to get around its websites quickly and
without running into any issues.

Using a range of AWS solutions, Expedia claims that it has become more
resilient, has the ability to develop new applications faster and can save
millions in the process. Magesh Chandramouli, Principal Architect, said:
“By using AWS, I’m not bound by throughput limitations or CPU capacity.
When I think of AWS, freedom is the first word that comes to mind”.

AIR BNB

It’s not just long established companies using AWS to run their compute
estate. Airbnb, a community rental marketplace for property owners and
travellers, lists more than 7 million accommodations and is a long-time
user of AWS.

Catering for millions of customers globally, the firm has continued to

invest in AWS solutions as it has grown rapidly in the past few years.
Currently, it has 200 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances to
manage its core application, memcache and search servers; Elastic
Load Balancing for handling incoming traffic between these
servers; Amazon Elastic MapReduce for processing and disseminating
data; Amazon Simple Storage Service for backups and static files; and
Amazon CloudWatch.
Since implementing these solutions, Airbnb takes the view that it’s better
equipped for future growth and can save money across its operations.
Tobi Knaup, an engineer at Airbnb, said: “Because of AWS, there has
always been an easy answer (in terms of time required and cost) to
scale our site.”

APPLE

When it comes to any aspect of its business, Apple is pretty secretive.

But according to a 2019 report by CNBC, it happens to be one of the
biggest spenders on AWS services. People familiar with the setup told
the American broadcaster that the Cupertino-based firm spends over
$30 million per month on Amazon cloud computing services.

The iPhone maker hasn’t confirmed these claims, but with growing
demand for internet services such as iCloud and Apple Music, it makes
sense that the firm would need a comprehensive cloud solution. CNBC
points out that Apple has worked with other cloud providers, including
Google and Microsoft, in the past.