Buying Mobile Workforce Management Software: Pros and Cons
Using commercial mobile workforce management software comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages of Buying a Mobile Workforce Management System
The clearest benefit of buying software is outsourcing all of the costs of building and maintaining the tool to third-parties. This singular advantage leads to myriad capital, time, and resource savings, as well as other more general benefits.
Cost Savings
Transparent costs. The most direct savings come in the form of vendor pricing structures, which are far simpler and more transparent than calculating the total cost of designing, planning, and building software. The vendor takes care of all these tasks, and throws in ongoing maintenance and innovation.
No maintenance or resource expenses. Maintenance includes product management, performance monitoring, quality assurance, testing, product releases, documentation, SLAs (service-level agreements), and even infrastructure and hosting in the case of cloud platforms. All of these are business resource-intensive tasks that are included in third-party mobile workforce management software.
Easier and cheaper to scale up. When you build your own system, scaling up means reorganizing your staff and resources, reconfiguring or rebuilding your software, allocating hardware and software resources, and—depending on how everything goes—potentially a disruption in service. When you buy a mobile workforce management system, scaling up just means paying for additional users or a new tier of service. This makes it simpler to grow and focus on your larger base of customers without sacrificing speed, service, or core values.
Guaranteed Quality, Reliability, and Support
Reliability and security. Increasingly competitive markets across industries demand reliable and secure software. Further, consumers are becoming more concerned about their private information and worried about the slew of security breaches and leaks that affect them. As a result, vendors must carefully vet the reliability of their software and show great care with sensitive information. Today, software companies get strict security certifications and build components into their systems that ensure uptime. These benefits trickle down to the users in the form of more secure, more reliable system access.
Fully QA tested and vetted product. Commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) products are carefully tested in QA environments, leveraging powerful tools and programming expertise unavailable to the average business. Because vendors are usually focused on a single product, service, or vertical, they ultimately sell the same thing to many other businesses. This means they can leverage feedback from every single client to improve the product for everyone.
Rapid bug fixes. A bug or deficient feature for one client can end up being a problem for all of a vendor’s customers, so software companies are highly motivated to release high-quality software and proactively remedy issues. Cloud COTS vendors are especially adept at discovering and fixing problems and pushing updates out to active deployments across the world with minimal friction. Plus, if another client notices an issue first and reports it to the vendor, this becomes an additional advantage—issues can be fixed before most end-users are even aware of them.
More advanced and expensive features. Because development is amortised by the vendor across a whole customer base, users get access to more advanced and, oftentimes, expensive features that would be unavailable in an in-house build.
Enhanced support network. Beyond the software itself, established commercial solutions have dedicated and vibrant user communities and good support resources. Combined with careful and widely-available documentation, this gives individual users the opportunity to connect with peers from other companies, learn how others use the tool, expand their network, and troubleshoot individual problems faster.
Compatibility and Straightforward Integrations
Built-in integration and compatibility. Although buyers must shop for software that best integrates with their existing processes, vendors increasingly build platforms compatible with the widest sets of architectures and endpoints. Many COTS products are completely plug-and-play, with easy installations, and immediately available to connect to existing software—a major benefit.
For example, most vendors now design platforms that support multiple different programming languages for command line and scripting interfaces, so end-users can use the tools they already know and are most familiar with to interact with the new software. Cloud platforms, especially, offer useful APIs and connectors that make linking disparate systems together more straightforward.
Open integration frameworks. Organizations can further expand the possibilities for easy, effective data integration with open integration frameworks. Customers can take a COTS solution and extend it with built-in frameworks—focusing on unique business requirements rather than reinventing and supporting ‘the wheel.’
Business Focus and Innovation
Constant innovation without resource drain. With the software company in charge of engineering, testing, monitoring, upgrades, and maintenance, internal staff can focus on organization goals. Commercial software is always updated and enhancements are part of regular costs, which save on resources, time, and the procedural distractions of building and maintaining a mobile workforce management platform.
Disadvantages of Buying a Mobile Workforce Management System
The disadvantages of buying software mostly align with the advantages of building:
- Less control over bugs and upgrades. With purchased software, organizations have less control over roadmap, support level, bug fixes, and the direction of future enhancements or features. However, most third-party vendors do have customer advisory boards (CAB) and feedback mechanisms that encourage customers to guide product direction.
- Less control over timing. Waiting for an external dev team to fix bugs, release patches, and roll these changes out on their own schedule introduces a level of uncertainty and inconvenience for a business’ internal teams. Again, this problem is mitigated for cloud solutions, where vendors are highly motivated to restore service as soon as possible, for all clients.
- Predetermined UI framework. Buyers must accept the UI framework, styling, and interfaces provided by the third-party.
- Fewer custom-built integrations. Depending on the third-party platform, you may have fewer options for custom-build integrations and special features. It also means less control over integrations amongst existing platforms and business processes, but it’s important to note that some mobile workforce management products are specifically built for integration, obviating these disadvantages entirely.
- Costs. Buying third-party does involve some costs, such as annual or monthly fees for licensing and services. Weigh the monthly or annual costs against the total cost of planning, building, and maintaining your mobile workforce management tool for a true comparison.
Should I Build Or Buy My Mobile Workforce Management Software?
Your organization and its needs are unique, and the decision to build or buy mobile workforce management software ultimately depends on a wide variety of different factors: development resources, budget constraints, industry standards, mobile workers’ needs, customer needs, and more.
Here are a few important questions to frame the build vs. buy conversation for your organization:
1. What are your resource and cost constraints?
Building custom software from scratch takes a lot of work, and it’s challenging to calculate the total cost of building it. As you consider the best route for your organization, take inventory of the following:
- Your budget. Can you calculate the cost of planning, building, and maintaining the tool over time? How does this fit in with your other business/budgetary priorities? Can you take on the cost of hiring and training additional developers to complete this project?
- Your development resources. Does your in-house team have the experience and expertise to build a mobile workforce management system? Do you need to hire additional developers to handle the influx of work? Do you need to hire specialized developers to code complex parts of the tool? Who will be responsible for ongoing maintenance and bug fixes? How will you collect requirements and feedback from both leadership and the mobile workers who will use the tool?
- Your other business priorities. Do you have other high-priority projects in the works that also require development resources? If so, how will you prioritize this work so other critical business functions can continue?
Once you have a good view of your budget and development resources, you can ask yourself the tough questions: Do we have the time and expertise to build it ourselves? And do we want our developers solely focused on this project for the next X months?
If you don’t have enough developer support, or you need your developers to be available for other work, buying a mobile workforce management platform might be the best fit.
2. How soon is the platform needed?
Buying software is more immediate, while designing and engineering takes time. If there is any urgency in deploying an effective mobile workforce management system, a pre-built platform is your best chance to get it up and running as soon as possible.
3. What are your organization’s software needs?
Building your own tool is a long-term commitment. It requires you to invest resources upfront (project management, software development, UX design, change management, etc.), as well as throughout the life of the tool (maintaining, testing, and improving the system). Even if the initial build is ready in 6 months, the project itself lasts for years—testing, iterating, and troubleshooting all the way until you build a new tool, or buy a proven mobile workforce management system.
All the while, the software industry continues to get deeper and wider, with new products available to manage or perform any task. In-house software development is declining in popularity, and it’s almost non-existent in major industries. More than ever, in-house development is seen as an exception, rather than the norm: a good route for genuinely unique or highly specialized use cases, or for services provided directly to other businesses, but not the kind of project you should take on lightly.
Think about where you are today, and where you want your organization to go. What are your organization’s software needs? Are you confident you can build a tool that works not only today, but in an undefined future? And if so, are you willing to get into the software development business for the next few years to build a truly great tool?
Mobile Workforce Management Software
Building your own mobile workforce management systems involves large upfront and ongoing investments in money, time, and manpower, but does allow greater flexibility and relative control over the platform. Unless your organization has extremely particular feature requirements, underused IT resources to devote to custom software, or are yourself in the business of workforce management services and software, it’s not as beneficial to build your own software.
Pre-built software depends on economies of scale, which deliver cost savings and greater efficiency for end users. Software vendors also are motivated by a commercial imperative to provide reliable, secure, and overall high-quality software.
Skedulo provides trusted, reliable, and easily integrated mobile workforce management software, which you can use to create seamless workflows across your unique tech stack. Book a demo today to see how mobile workforce management software can transform your business!
