Moving to Mobile: Buy or Build?

Executing supply chain processes through a mobile device, and integrating directly with SAP, brings advantages of increased productivity, enhanced operational efficiencies and reduced costs. However, in order to maximise these benefits it is important that the applications are correctly set up and implemented.

Many companies have internal IT resource with the capabilities to build new mobile applications, which could potentially deliver an effective solution for simple processes. When integration with more complex processes is required, that is when the benefits of an external specialist can come into play.

Changes to business or operational processes are inevitable and will often require modifications within the mobile applications to cater for these. The development work to incorporate these could take an internal team weeks or months, however the pre-built solutions from an external partner will typically only require quick configuration changes, rather than bespoke changes to the code.

IT departments boast in-depth knowledge of business activities and will quickly understand the requirements of a new solution. We understand this means there may be concerns that an external partner will not have the necessary understanding to implement an effective solution. However, our first priority is always getting under the skin of a business to ensure we gain a detailed understanding of the operation.

Utilising a specialist partner that not only has expertise in mobile development and SAP, but also a deep understanding of Supply Chain processes, can bring multiple benefits. Our product development consultants are SAP Supply Chain specialists and have a wealth of experience implementing mobile solutions for a wide range of warehousing and production processes.

We have a complete library covering more than 150 supply chain processes that can all be configured to individual customer needs, while also offering the capability to build bespoke applications to manage unique processes.

Cost is often the biggest driver to building a solution in-house, as the initial cost outlay is not perceived to be as high. However, the costs associated with ongoing support and change requests can quickly spiral, both with the time and cost to implement the changes and the cost implications to other projects being delayed if internal resource needs to be reallocated. Having these tasks managed externally offers significant long-term cost savings.

Take a closer look at what to consider when implementing SAP mobile applications.