A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… There were RAD tools like Borland Delphi* or even ASP.Net WebForms. Developers were able to build applications very quickly, and the quality of created products was good too. However, most solutions developed with this approach have standard UI design. It was a long time ago. Today we have NodeJS, React, ASP.Net MVC, and many other remarkable technologies that allow us to use high-quality, unique UI designs because standard UI design is unacceptable. Or not? Are you comfortable paying four times more for your custom ERP just because of the custom graphic design of buttons? It looks like many people ask this question today.
One of the possible answers is to buy Zoho and other similar platforms. But let’s be honest, these tools are never good enough for our needs. And our managers spent weeks working on reports. Every business is unique and needs special tools.
In Tesseris Pro, we use Oracle APEX technology for our ERP system. We are not a big company, so a free version of Oracle DB is more than enough for all our data. Accounting, time management, project management, CRM, resource planning, enterprise strategy planning, analytics, HR data, everything is in our internal custom system. We have good integration with 3rd party systems and are free to change our processes. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it?
What is your estimate for this kind of system for the first version and yearly support and development? Several thousands of hours, right? And hundreds of hours per year for ongoing development and support. In our company, we spent about 150 hours on the initial development and QA of the first version and not more than 40 hours yearly for quite intensive ongoing development. That is not a miracle, but the low-code approach. Here, we skipped the business analysis stage because our developers know most processes well. We will need about 100-200 additional hours for BA in reality. It’s just a small example of intelligent solutions that we can offer. Let’s do our work efficiently and wisely!
*By the way, Delphi is still available on the market and has a second life with the Embracadero brand.