Let’s face it; your associates are busy performing routine daily processes. Often that same process is taught to new employees, many of which are too shy or intimidated by their new role to question the efficiency and effectiveness of what they’re learning.
Or, the new employee may not understand the “big picture” well enough to evaluate the process and suggest changes. This is where a Business Analyst’s custom software design assessment can help!
While development often begins with an initial assessment before the design phase, the custom software design assessment is an in-depth look at your business objectives and current daily processes. A Business Analyst is experienced in quickly learning your business goals and hurdles, along with shadowing your employees to see how they tackle the everyday business tasks. While this contributes to a better design because of the background information obtained, there are also some bonuses to this approach.
#1 Business Analyst Help
Our Business Analysts have experience with Business Process Analysis, which allows them to take a step back when shadowing the current processes in place and understand the “why” behind them. We can view the existing methods with an open mind, looking for ideas on how each method can be optimized for efficiency and effectiveness to streamline effort and capture the essential data points, which will provide the most useful feedback and analytics to the company.
When a Business Analyst (BA) does this initial assessment, the deep dive into fully understanding the processes in place allows the BA to identify inefficiencies in the current operations, and also look for opportunities for automation and system integration. This can ensure that your custom software design not only fits your line of business but also enhances your individual business needs.
#2 Save Money
While some business owners are reluctant to spend this additional money upfront for the assessment cost, this step has been shown to save money later in both the design and build phase, as well as in ongoing future cost savings due to increased automation and system integrations that may have been missed without this additional analysis. This automation can reduce payroll costs and free up the current employees to handle only those tasks that require a human touch.
#3 Reduced Applications
Another benefit is that we can often find areas of your business that can be sufficiently handled with an existing, off-the-shelf application, and then integrated with the new custom software modules so that the new build requires less time and money. This prevents spending time building yet another accounting system or CRM system or may even allow us to keep portions of your existing system that are a good fit, and only build the custom pieces that you need.
We can often connect systems seamlessly so that they feel like a single application to your users. This can reduce time to completion of the project, and get your new and improved system in place faster than ever!
#4 Effective Training
For areas that are found to be most effectively handled manually, we can create workflow diagrams that illustrate your current processes, and compare those to a proposed future process diagram that will aid in training new and existing employees on a better way to operate.
We can also provide your team with guidance and suggestions on how your processes can fit together to streamline tasks so you can save time and money, along with improving service to your customers. This in-depth understanding of your business ensures a perfectly tailored custom solution to your business problems, along with a thorough understanding of what reporting is needed so that we can design and build the perfect solution for your needs.