ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT SERVICES OVERVIEW

Little kids—little problems, big kids—big problems. 

The same applies to businesses. 

SMB may face many issues in their daily operations, but big corporations make daily decisions that impact thousands of lives, positively or negatively. Finding a partner with the right spectrum, quality, and rates for enterprise software development services is one of those make-it-or-break-it factors for bigger companies.

Let’s first review which software development services are most popular with businesses of 500+ employees. And among those services, which ones are critical for a digital transformation and have the highest ROI.

What is an Enterprise Software Development Service?

Enterprise software development service is a specific set of technical activities that enhance one facet or function of a company with the help of digital technologies and programming. System integration, software engineering, cloud migration, system design architecture, ERP development, cybersecurity monitoring, and web application development are some common examples.

Many Fortune 500 companies have reached success because they are leaders  in technological adoption, digital transformation, cloud computing, and getting insights from big data. Continual technological upgrades, enhancements, and modernization processes are now a given, and industry leaders see them as the new norm. 

Some of the key missions and benefits of hiring a software development partner that offers these transformative services for larger corporations include:

Benefits of Key Enterprise Software Development Services

Even the biggest companies will look for enterprise software development consulting at some point. However strong your in-house engineering may be, adding a team of battle-tested tech-savvy brains to work on your goal at the ideation stage has positive ripple effects throughout SDLC.

Architectural, network-level, and vendor decisions are ground-laying aspects that will define many activities, for multiple departments, regions, and team members for years to come. So, the more rounded the snapshot of the status quo, desirable output, and means of initially getting you there, the better. 

Businesses are on the lookout for a professional software development partner with enterprise-grade projects on their portfolio for a host of reasons starting with process automation.

Process Automation

Most manual processes in manufacturing units are now automated, in the office and in manufacturing units.

However, when it comes to enterprises’ digital transformation in one global corporation, with multiple departments with similar functions, RPA [robotic process automation] has excellent potential to bring a quick ROI.

Basic enterprise software development services allow you to automate routine repetitive tasks for HR, accounting, administration, and purchasing departments. One example of an RPA process is a report automatically uploaded from a specific system at a certain time to a specific email list.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

If you have a user-friendly mobile application for your customers, they receive automated timely notifications from your business, you have every possible payment system integrated with your ecommerce solution, and a loyalty program, your customer satisfaction will be OK. 

If you have an omni-channel marketing solution, personalized promotional engine, day-to-day delivery due to cutting edge logistics program, best IoT integrations in the industry, your customer satisfaction is likely to evolve into loyalty sooner rather than later.

According to Flexera, 29% of the spending on IT initiatives was directed towards enhancing customer experience in 2021.

Customer satisfaction is tightly dependent on how digitized your client-facing processes are. And even more so, how digitally advanced your procurement, manufacturing units, logistics, and operations are.

Mobility and On-the-Go Access to Systems

Cloud computing services will include a default setting on the services menu for any reputable software development vendor. Easy access to the cloud services via a browser from anywhere in the world is critical for so many industries. Construction, insurance, medical services, and governmental social services are just a few industries that rely on mobile apps that allow access to a system on the go.

Another benefit is for professionals who like to travel a lot such as sales, marketing, and C-suite, who need access to the reporting dashboards to execute their high-impact duties with little to no interruptions.

Single Pane of Glass for Management

Keeping all team members on the same page is critical in big companies. Senior management with daily access to the same dashboard and visually presented data gain fluency in reporting and spotting what matters quickly. 

This regular exposure to the same set of critical data points enables data-based decision making, better understanding of business and the market and enhances interdepartmental cooperation.

A healthy competitive spirit never hurts a company. And having regional data lined up on a screen side by side makes regional executives more effective, too.

Costs Decrease Across the Board

Cost efficiency can be found in a number of big and small ways such as when an enterprise goes from legacy-driven infrastructure to a modern, connected digitally transformed, cloud-deployed business.

Costs will diminish, including recruitment costs, cheaper delivery costs due to warehouse management software, optimized pricing due to revenue management solutions, better accounting practices with ERP, or saving on purchasing. The list is endless.

Easy Onboarding and Team Member Transfer

Recruitment costs in American companies are considerable. According to SHRM, an average hire costs businesses $4,700.

On the other hand, recruitment is one of those processes that can be significantly digitized, driving up major KPIs: decreasing time to hire, lowering cost per hire, cutting turnover, and elevating onboarding experience.

From the use of IoT glasses with video recipes for training chefs in the kitchen, to gamified onboarding courses, LinkedIn ads integrated with email drip campaigns, the spectrum of digital enhancement in HR is significant.

And if a manager has to shift regions, with similar digitized standards and procedures, the stress of moving is significantly minimized, as comfort zone scenery remains unchanged.

A Happier and More Productive Team

When associates get introduced to new tools, they could demonstrate a natural and initial resistance to change. But in the long run, they can do their job more efficiently with less human errors by automating mundane processes. 

According to KRC research’s Work Market survey, 70% of business leaders agree that automation will help companies build effective teams.

Enterprise digital transformation allows teams to concentrate on strategic and control roles, while AI and technology deals with the tedious technical tasks.

Better Security

High enterprise security standards come from many places: the costly mistake, a hi-caliber in-house team with up-to-the-minute understanding of the dangers and consequences of poor security, and technology.

For example, the tough competition between major cloud service providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. These big tech hegemons invest millions into packing their cloud solutions with security features such as default setting.

But competition between third party vendors such as Hashi Vault, Terraform, Ansible, and Snyk enable enterprise-level monitoring, alerting, safe config management, and software provisioning practices.

Planned Disaster Prevention

Strict security measures can minimize a company’s vulnerability to hacking, but we have little power to counteract overpowering natural and human disasters.

Natural disasters or human error may destroy servers, impact data centers, disable connectivity, and cause costly downtime.

A well-architected enterprise tech ecosystem will have a number of counter levers in place that will ensure a rigorous business continuity plan has data backups and other disaster recovery activities in place.

Innovator and Leader Status

Lastly, once you have grown your team to over 500+ employees, you may also have the ambition to grow your business to become one of the industry’s leader board reputable members.

Naturally, companies that now shape many industries now, from ecommerce and FinTech, to Healthtech and Edutech, are also leaders in technological transformation.

Amazon recommendation engine, for example, used to be a rarity less than one generation away. Not only is it a staple feature for any basic ecommerce store but also it is now responsible for 35% of all Amazon purchases.

The benefits of the technical evolution of your company’s digital ecosystem are many, but they are not always measurable. For this reason, innovators keep investing in new tools, integrations, and approaches because they know ROI is awaiting.

The Dev.Pro team works with a lineup of clients, including Fortune 500 companies that use our custom enterprise software development services to build, modernize, integrate, and secure their complex networks.

Enterprise Software Development Services

Many 500+ big companies have a sizable list of technical vendors: some hierarchical structures can be as complex as having a mix of in-house, outsourced, augmented, and extensions teams. Remote cooperation is a staple in the industry. And with most things residing on the cloud, on-prem IT teams can be minimal.

The spread of responsibilities among talent pools depends on a corporation’s needs, budgets, project life expectancy projection, and so on. Dev.Pro will hire enterprise software developers for our clients according to their preferred engagement format: extension teams, staff augmentation, per project, or even a monthly retainer for some IT services.

Let’s review some of the most in demand services in the enterprise league:

Enterprise Software Development Consulting

Even though a deliverable of this service will not include anything tangible, like a functioning web app or a migrated database from Excel to SQL, this service is the most critical part in any pivotal tech project for bigger companies.

Consulting usually involves team members with a lot of experience in building complex ecosystems in hybrid and cloud environments. Your minimum team should include a cloud architect, solutions engineer, senior DevOps engineer, FinOps specialist, QA expert, and security engineer. Still, we recommend involving a BA and a product manager early in the process for the product side.

The software development consulting stage is designed to bridge the gap between the existing systems and its future version by designing modern architecture, selecting the right tech stack, prioritizing the technical activities, and integrating best industry practices into the process.

Depending on your vendor of choice, at the end of the enterprise software development consulting stage you should end up with some of these key deliverables:

• a project’s road map
• a team structure
• a budget estimate
• feasibility study
• market research
• stakeholders interviews
• competitive set best practices 
• similar product features comparison
• expert recommendation for implementation

But the biggest advantage of hiring a vendor for this consulting role is getting to know your vendor for further development phases.

You can familiarize yourself with the vendor’s:

• level of expertise
• portfolio
• extent of responsiveness
• compatibility of time zone factor
• smoothness of communication
• accessibility of the senior management
• efficiency of the decision making process
• adaptability to your requirements
• value of their insights in the ultimate decision matrix.

These benefits are a bonus for your project’s feasibility study. If all things go well, you can use this same vendor for full or partial implementation of these projects as well.

Luckily for clients, due to a dense saturation of the software development industry, outsource engineering companies will adapt to the client’s needs, starting with recruiting one or two engineers, exhibiting flexibility on SLA terms, and being open to molding their offer.

Enterprise System Architecture Design

Dozens of architecture designs could be chosen for a specific solution. 

For example, serverless, microservices, layered pattern, event bus structure, peer-to-peer, blackboard, and client server pattern. The combinations are endless for a network as complex as enterprise system architecture.

API management, messengers, load balancers, ETLs, servers, databases, backup data centers, cloud tools, containerization platforms all need to talk to each other, and to be connected and synched. Ideally, the sync will allow for near-time reporting. In the best case scenario, they will be optimized to use the least amount of cloud computing resources, too, for lower monthly cloud bills. 

Like when viewing a great work of art, we often need to step back to see it clearly. In the case of software system architecture planning, experience is the only position from which you can gain the right distance to see any potential pitfalls and arrange systems for best performance from the start.

Getting an external vendor to work with your company on the architecture is highly recommended because strategy and brainstorming needs a concentration of experience, while tactical implementation can then be performed by less senior teams.

ERP Development and Integration

Enterprise resource planning system development is another popular service for larger companies.

These complex tools will usually have these core functionalities:

• Contact management
• Transaction and deal management
• SCM
• Manufacturing
• Human Resources Management
• Inventory Management
• Order Management
• Accounting and invoicing
• Financial Reporting
• Procurement Module
• Warehouse Management
• Analytics and BI
• Marketing and Sales Integration

Even if companies prefer to purchase a vendor-made solution, there is plenty of customization, regional adaptation, and integration to be done.

The ERP is usually connected with the CRM, SCM, HRM, accounting software, ecommerce solutions, reporting, and BI portals to name a few.

Custom ERP development from scratch is a costly exercise and is mostly relevant for those market leaders who aim to get a competitive advantage via a proprietary, industry-leading solution based on their confidential data and insights.

Due to cloud computing, ERP products are now more affordable than in the times of on-prem deployment. However, it’s critical to ensure that you customize major features to your company’s needs and align them with your long-term goals.

CRM Development and Integration

CRM solutions are even more universal and abundant on the market in affordable price ranges. And, CRM tools are simpler, as they manage client data, their transactions, communication, meetings, deals, and so on.

Due CRM systems’ affordability and wide selection, only bigger companies may want to custom build a CRM from scratch, to have a 100% customized functionality.

CRM integration services are much more common, as it is critical to ensure two-way synchronization of all systems for the top performance of operations and administrative units alike. 

B2B companies with bigger average checks may still get away with CRM as a standalone technical entity. Meanwhile, ecommerce, B2C corporations, and B2B with smaller checks benefit greatly from having a CRM integrated with an ecommerce engine, inventory software, payment systems, and ERP.

SCM Development and Integration

This critical part of the technical ecosystem for FMCG and e commerce units, as well as for manufacturing companies, SCM systems can be both custom made and vendor supplied.

These are core SCM system features:

• Warehouse Management
• Inventory Management
• Shipping Management
• Supplier Management
• Transportation Management
• Monitoring & Planning
• Order Fulfillment
• Demand Forecasting 
• Procurement Management
• Import / Export Management
• Sales and Operation Planning
• Supply Chain Analytics & Reporting
• Accounting Integration

Oracle Netsuite, Fishbowl, Odoo, Dynamics 365, and Quickbooks are some of the key players on the SCM software vendors’ market when it comes to large scale enterprise software development.

Just as with the other enterprise custom software development, when it comes to SCM, many companies will buy a ready-made solution and customize it to their needs. So, customization, integration, and migration are the most popular services.

Enterprise System Integration Services

This service is a broader team made up of the three above, involving the integration of everything with anything on a corporate level. Ensuring that the data flows both ways as quickly as possible means that the right data points get connected to their respective analogues in another system without causing any bottleneck irrespective of the load and spikes.

The flow of this activity will entail these steps:

• Analysis and audit of the existing tech inventory and its connectivity
• Planning of the design of new architecture with prioritizing of the systems, road mapping, team structure, and budget preparation
• Hiring a team of enterprise integration engineers and procurement of chosen tools and 
• Integration of systems as per planned priorities
• Testing and deployment
• Monitoring and alerting
• Maintenance and upgrades

Many bigger corporations that deal with manufacturing or ecommerce business absolutely need to have near-real time visibility into their operations and sales. This makes enterprise software integration services even more responsible and mission critical.

Enterprise Cloud Migration

With 94% of businesses using some kind of cloud service, cloud migration and modernization projects are in high demand.

Cloud cost optimization—or FinOps—is one of the ground-laying disciplines whose principles need to be embedded in any enterprise cloud migration project. In this linked piece we share 15 tips on how to decrease the AWS bill.

These technical exercises may involve one cloud service provider or call for a multi-cloud environment to avoid vendor lock-in; include a mix of private and public clouds for confidential and more operational workloads; demand a thorough planning of instances, zones, tooling, storage types, to avoid paying for idle workloads.

If you need to migrate databases, services, or storage, or if you are considering a shift and lift, replatforming or refactoring, enterprise cloud migration service is the wrong cost center to save on vendors. The ROI from the purchasing and architectural decisions alone often amount to millions of dollars in savings, when done right.

Digital Transformation for Enterprise 

Digital transformation services for enterprise are routine for most technically advanced industry leaders.

However, the initial digital transformation projects require the most patience and experience

Let’s start with patience.

There is always resistance to change in any team or organization. Overcoming this barrier and getting a key stakeholder on board is critical for mission success in the short and long term. 

If a digital transformation committee manages to find the right software development partner, they may help ease this otherwise painful acceptance process. 

An experienced vendor will roll out a series of educational meetings, sync all key project milestones as they get approved, involve all departments in the planning, and provide progress visibility for all.

Enterprise Software Application Development

Depending on your industry, you may need to create a web app that addresses and automates one or more of your manufacturing unit’s  operational routines. Or you may need to hire a team for an enterprise mobile software development project to create a better version of a vendor solution into a mobile format.

This service is one of the broadest definitions of all of the above, as it may involve creating a web app or a mobile application, for any department or any function, written in any programming language in a platform-agnostic framework.

While sharing the main SDLC stages of ANALYSIS – PLANNING – DESIGN – BUILD – TEST – DEPLOY – MAINTAIN, these projects are usually characterized by bigger scope and extensive architecture due to the company size and project complexity. So, it is highly recommended that you look for a technical partner with reputation, experience, and relevant use cases.

How to Know The Right Enterprise Software Development Company

When searching for enterprise software development companies, these aspects matter [as in will have impact on both quality and cost of your entire project, let alone the smoothness of this anyway complex journey]:

1. Transparency and observability in all processes and documentation
2. Access to executive team intro call 
3. Proven experience on the market and in the specific project specialty
4. Proven ability to hire quickly high quality tech talent, retain them, and organize work flows
5. Demonstrates adaptability and flexibility in the vendor interview
6. Reasonable pricing policy [beware of the outright cheap rates, quick budget estimates, blurred job seniority concepts, and small fonts]
7. Examples of positive conflict management cases as well as of collected performance under time-pressure
8. Positive AND genuine ratings on both employee review sites and client-review sites.

We invite you to speak to one of our devoted client associates to discuss your enterprise-level software development services. And we also encourage you to speak to a few other potential suppliers. It may be time consuming to conduct vendor interviews with three to five candidates, but it helps to get a first impression and to better understand your project requirements.