We have a standard process while helping a customer build a technology solution when it comes to software. That is always the sticking point. We can come up with a hardware solution pretty quickly; the issue is how to get that new hardware communicating with the back-end business software.
The first question is, can the new hardware just communicate directly with your back-end systems. With mobile computers, that is frequently the case using a browser. But label printers, fixed scanners, machine vision, and especially RFID are usually different stories.
So, if we can’t work directly with your business software, then we get to the fork in the road which is, build or buy the software. We prefer to buy, but sometimes there is not a good option out there to purchase. Sometimes the software needed is straight forward to write, and we have written it before.
If the software needed is more of a middleware solution, just getting data from a device and into a database table, that is the type of coding that we do every day. If a full application is needed, then writing that becomes prohibitive, and we need to start looking at the purchase of software to get the project done. Now let’s go down the purchase software trail for a while. Software salespeople are the most frustrating for us to work with. Spending time with a customer to really understand the need, and the use case seems to be rare with software salespeople. Instead, the process is, sit down, shut up, and listen to my very long demo. If you bring up objections, the answer is to change your process to adapt to the software. Want a ballpark price, that is simply impossible. The big red flag for us is when the code has to be customized for every customer use case. That means that not enough development has been done to make the software configurable for multiple applications.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Label printing software is super flexible and will work out of the box for most labeling use cases. The rapid development applications that we use like MCL are really good right out of the box and allow us to customize a mobile device application very quickly, and cost effectively.
We continue to build our use of AI for custom applications in the hopes that we will be able to take on bigger applications for customers at a cost-effective price.
So, if you want a technology partner who has many options for the software conundrum, visit us at www.emptechgroup.com to learn more.
