| Approach | A useful fit when | What to investigate |
|---|---|---|
| Off-the-shelf product | An established tool covers the important tasks and your team can work within its process. | User licences, configuration, supplier support, exports and limits on the features you need. |
| Integration or small custom tool | Your existing tools work well individually, but a gap between them creates manual work. | Supported APIs, data ownership, rate limits, duplicate records and responsibility when a connection fails. |
| Custom application | A business-critical workflow or customer service needs behaviour that existing tools cannot provide. | Development scope, data migration, ownership, hosting, maintenance and support over the system’s lifetime. |
Choose an existing product when the fit is good.
For a common process with well-understood requirements, an established product may give you the functionality and support you need sooner. Check the features, user costs, data exports and integrations against your real workflow.
A small compromise in how you work may be more sensible than commissioning and maintaining an entire application. Test the important tasks with the people who will use the system before deciding it cannot fit.
Consider custom development when the gaps matter.
Bespoke software becomes worth exploring when the work that differentiates your business is difficult to handle in standard tools. Examples include repeated re-entry between systems, a complex production workflow or a customer service that needs its own interface.
Describe the problem in operational terms: where information is lost, which decisions are delayed and what people do manually. A feature list is more useful when it is connected to a specific task and user.
Look at the whole cost of ownership.
An existing product can have licence, implementation, integration and training costs. A custom application needs discovery, development, hosting, maintenance and support. Compare both over the period you expect to use them.
Motion’s custom software projects typically start from £10,000. The actual quote depends on the workflow, user roles, data migration, integrations and release scope. An entry price is not a quote for a complete business system.
A phased approach can connect both.
You may be able to retain a useful product and build an integration or a small internal tool around the gaps. The first release should solve a defined problem and establish how the data and support responsibilities will work.
Our work for AW Aluminium covers timesheets, orders, vehicle tracking, RAMS, plant hire, estimating and quotations, fabrication, quality management and delivery tracking. It shows the range a bespoke system can cover as the business scope develops.
Test the decision with one real task.
Take a representative task, such as preparing a quotation and passing an accepted order to production. Write down the inputs, checks, approvals and information the next person needs. Include an exception, such as a changed specification after the quote is accepted.
Try that task in the product you are considering. Record where configuration would solve the problem, where an integration could help and where a genuine gap remains. Use those findings to brief a supplier and compare proposed solutions.
Questions to answer before development.
Who will use the system? What data already exists? Which permissions are needed? What happens if an integration is unavailable? How will the team review and test the application? Who will own, host and support it?
Bring those questions and the process you want to improve to a discovery discussion. Motion works remotely from Doncaster with businesses in Sheffield and across the UK.