Various off-the-shelf solutions currently dominate the software market. The majority of the apps on it are pre-developed by software developers or organizations, providing their users with a similarly predefined set of capabilities. In many situations, this is more than sufficient for business operations, as many companies still rely on human labor, which is currently impossible to augment with machines due to the current stage of technological progress. However, the world is rapidly changing: after years of mostly invisible advancements, AI and robotics innovations are now transforming labor worldwide, heralding a new industrial revolution.
While some areas of economic activity remain seemingly unaffected, major transformations will inevitably occur everywhere. In this light, demand for custom software explicitly tailored to the needs of particular companies is rising due to the significant shifts in business operations that open up many opportunities for completely reshaping existing markets. This article provides an in-depth overview of custom software development for manufacturing, offering a comprehensive guide to the topic.
Defining Custom Software Development
Let’s start with defining custom software development. Custom software development is the creation of software tailored to the specific needs of particular businesses. Instead of relying on outside solutions to achieve their goals, some companies partner with software development firms to create custom solutions that closely align with their internal processes and workflows.
This approach to development stands in opposition to the so-called off-the-shelf solutions, which are developed by software companies (or individual developers) to sell their products to numerous producers in their sector. These solutions are typically cheaper because developers often bear organizational costs and can lower prices to reach the mass market. For this reason, the majority of custom solutions were primarily limited to new markets and products that targeted some unique, previously unaccounted-for client needs. This situation is changing rapidly today, however.
The AI Revolution and Custom Software
The AI revolution is expected to increase the demand for custom software worldwide significantly. Two reasons exist for this rapid transformation of the software markets:
1) Major shifts in labor and production techniques altogether redefine markets and intensify competition. Many manufacturing segments in the preceding decade were dominated by a set of market leaders. A relatively slow change in production techniques at the time allowed those companies to capture a stable and secure position in the market. Often, market domination strategies at that time relied more on resource availability and brand loyalty rather than innovations per se. Today, however, the situation is shifting because advancements in AI and robotics enable many startups to rapidly change markets by introducing innovations that may sometimes be difficult to implement in larger companies due to organizational inertia. For this reason, we expect the demand for custom software to grow across the global economy as big companies will try to defend their existing positions in the market, and small companies (startups and niche leaders) will try to change the market configuration through software and hardware innovations quickly.
2) The rise of AI and related machine learning tools for developers is likely to transform the very nature of software development, significantly speed up many processes in the field, and thus lower general costs for custom software development. In practice, this means that many smaller companies will now be able to collaborate with development partners and create their custom solutions, significantly increasing the competitive rates across the industry. Just five years ago, custom software development was primarily available only to companies that relied entirely on software solutions for their business practices or had sufficient resources to invest in advanced forms of research and development. Now, AI is likely to make custom software more accessible than it was in the past.
In this light, we can draw two conclusions about the custom software market: custom software is becoming an increasingly vital factor of success for many startups and large companies, and more importantly, its availability to businesses is rising, making the adoption of this technology a feasible strategy for manufacturers.
Custom Solutions: Main Benefits
A typical description of custom solutions on the Internet often mentions the positives of this technology only along with its primary issue, which was inseparable from them even five years ago. This problem was cost: in many cases, custom solutions were costly, making their adoption difficult. As we’ve demonstrated above, the spread of AI is likely to alter this pattern in the coming years and is already doing so in some sectors. For this reason, we want to primarily highlight the main benefits of this technology before concluding this article:
1) Custom software is tailored to meet the specific needs of your business. Off-the-shelf solutions are excellent in situations where production practices are, more or less, static and uniform across a specific market. Once there is a need to consider specific environmental characteristics or changing market conditions, these apps are unlikely to operate at peak efficiency. Tailored custom solutions solve this problem once and for all by allowing their owners to add features they need and redevelop them according to their business requirements. As a result, it is possible to optimize those apps towards the most complex needs of their workforce.
2) Full control over the development process. A significant problem with off-the-shelf software is the issue of vendor lock-in: many companies that rely too much on a particular app may face issues with the design decisions of their developers or sudden price changes. The inability to introduce changes to those apps and the risk of sudden software support termination are also significant challenges. Custom software resolves this problem once and for all by giving its users full control over development and complete ownership of their software code. Consequently, these apps significantly raise the flexibility and adaptability of businesses.
Conclusion
To summarize, custom software development represents the future of software for manufacturing. The introduction of AI and the changing market conditions triggered by the artificial intelligence revolution will inevitably motivate more companies to seek development assistance from organizations like Keenethics. For this reason, we expect custom software to become a significant trend in the years to come across all markets, including the manufacturing one.
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