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Large corporations heavily rely on technology to achieve their business goals, increase productivity, and automate processes. Manual task completion has become a relic of the past. Although some companies use off-the-shelf products, these systems can never fully satisfy all their needs. Custom enterprise mobile application development allows businesses to create solutions tailored to their unique requirements, risks, and industries. Instead of settling for a ready solution, consider developing your own application.
In this article, we will dive into the enterprise mobile application development process, the benefits of such apps, and the costs of development. We will explore which departments can benefit from enterprise apps and how to ensure your product will be useful and successful.
Enterprise mobile application development is the process of building a solution used within an organization. Mainly more feature-rich and complex than consumer apps, enterprise mobility solutions enable employees to fulfill their tasks more effectively. The specificity of this process lies in the business goals, weaknesses, and inefficiencies that the app is meant to solve. Moreover, enterprise applications are expected to adjust to meet ever-changing needs and market trends. These aspects require scalability and speed when creating a solution.
The primary difference between consumer and enterprise mobile app development services is the target audience and additional requirements. For example, such apps require a higher level of data security, expanded functionality, and customization features. Furthermore, enterprise mobility solutions should be integrable with the current corporate system. Finally, this software needs to be scalable and focus on the employees’ and company’s needs and pain points.
Depending on which parts of your business require optimizing, you can develop an application for various purposes. Let’s explore the most common enterprise apps that organizations build to cover their needs.
Finance enterprise mobile applications are designed to handle payments, invoices, payroll, and other financial functions. Such an app is created to automate and manage transactions, consolidate them in one source, and establish transparency and traceability.
CRM software solutions allow businesses to keep track of their customer information, including contact details, order history, shopping behavior, communication with customer support, and more. Designed to unify all the necessary data associated with a certain customer, CRM systems are used across the organization.
Business management apps aid companies in making their business processes more efficient. For example, they offer workflow automation, analytics features, performance management dashboards, etc.
Another vital part of any organization, resource management enterprise applications help organizations plan budgets, manage risks, organize projects, and more. In other words, ERP systems are created to efficiently manage and allocate various resources, including time, money, and labor.
These enterprise apps support recruiters and internal HR specialists by providing a platform to manage current staff, onboard newcomers, track employee performance, etc.
Mobile apps that manage projects, monitor resource expenditure, and track deadlines, this type of enterprise software is especially crucial when dealing with large projects. They can also provide collaboration features to facilitate open and transparent communication channels.
Marketing management enterprise application helps marketers schedule and automate marketing campaigns as well as track their performances.
Enterprise mobile apps can bring a plethora of advantages to your business. From task automation and compliance to barrier-free communication, these apps can increase your overall productivity.
Enterprise data management refers to storing, processing, and analyzing company data. Reports show that an average employee spends up to 2 hours per day searching for information they require to perform their duties. Enterprise mobile application development provides workers with solutions that optimize data workflow. Having a single unified system with access to essential information allows your staff to focus on their tasks without wasting valuable time.
On top of that, a consolidated data view unlocks the potential for analysis and verification of your information. Such mobile apps remove duplicates and inconsistencies that dilute the accuracy of the company’s data. Additionally, a single source of truth facilitates better log monitoring and increases transparency.
Besides streamlining financial management and eliminating human error associated with payroll and accounting, an enterprise application facilitates better compliance. Such systems offer the functionality to optimize collaboration with tax professionals, auditors, and other authorities. They provide a single platform to safely store, share, and alter any file and use permission management to prevent unauthorized access.
Custom enterprise mobile app development can also deliver systems for comprehensive resource management. This way, your finance department can calculate budgets, make financial predictions, evaluate risks, and more. Additionally, enterprise mobile apps help companies automate financial transactions and avoid missed control payment deadlines and consequential fines.
Aside from recruitment, the functionality of the HR department involves onboarding, employee assessment, training, workplace safety compliance, and more. Especially for businesses that operate remotely, managing employees’ working hours, bonuses, and absences can become quite challenging. HR management apps offer a big-picture overview of their entire office and facilitate a more efficient work structure.
Using enterprise software, HR professionals can partially delegate the onboarding process to the system. They can prepare a set of documents explaining how the company operates and customize them depending on the employee’s position.
Storing company data in one location allows for more advanced analytics procedures. Businesses that track data and extract vital information gain access to meaningful insights that facilitate a more sound strategy. Additionally, you will be able to monitor your business goals in real-time and oversee their progress. By setting up notifications for vital metrics, your managers can immediately respond and salvage the issue.
Supply chain management is a vast topic that contains anything from warehouse and inventory management to logistical processes. Automated systems provide enormous opportunities for manufacturers and retailers by eliminating human error, streamlining tasks, and allocating resources. Instead of asking a warehouse manager to manually count the number of items, you can employ mobile marketplace apps to keep track of the products.
These business suites can also assist you in identifying the most optimal delivery routes, enhancing load management, and facilitating advanced tracking tools. By using enterprise mobile apps, companies can prevent misdeliveries, avoid product losses, and increase customer experience.
You can also leverage enterprise mobile application development to improve the quality and responsiveness of the customer support department. In conjunction with AI algorithms, you can build an application that is available 24/7 and handles simple and repetitive requests. Using customer data derived from your data analytics procedures, you can even personalize each conversation to further increase client satisfaction.
When starting the enterprise mobile app development process, it’s recommended to focus on essential features that shape the final product. After a successful launch, you can collect feedback and expand the app’s functionality with more advanced tools. In this section, we will discuss which core functions you should consider adding to your technological solution.
Like any other mobile application, an enterprise solution requires a robust user authentication process with sophisticated security standards. To increase data protection, companies embed multi-factor authentication using tokens, messages, one-time passwords, etc. User roles also include permission management that dictates what a user can access, edit, and delete.
Enterprise mobile apps deal with large data volumes which requires safe and resilient data storage and transfer. Your application should be connected to a database to deposit various pieces of customer and company information. If you are building enterprise mobile applications for collaboration, make sure to include data-sharing features to facilitate a simple and secure data transfer.
Storing data in the cloud offers access to optimized data management as well as easy access from anywhere in the world. As long as your employees have an internet connection, they can simply log in and retrieve any information they require. Cloud computing services are also highly scalable which allows you to seamlessly grow without worrying about additional servers. Finally, using cloud storage is a cost-saving strategy as you can take advantage of the pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Enterprise mobile application development also involves building a strong messaging platform that connects employees throughout the organization. This feature allows workers to instantly find their colleagues via the app to exchange information or solve issues. Clear and open communication channels are key to success for any business or department.
Aside from integrating with the existing IT environment of your company, an enterprise tool needs to connect to third-party services. Developing enterprise applications is a lengthy and expensive process which is why organizations utilize APIs to expand the functionality. For example, you can integrate your enterprise mobile applications with Google Docs to collaboratively create and finalize documents.
Alerts and push notifications are meant to update workers in case something urgently requires their attention. Especially in the remote work environment, your employees might be online at different times of the day. Having the option to inform them whenever an emergency occurs will help you to solve problems faster and avoid escalations.
Regardless of your location, power outages can happen anywhere. Offer your employees access to a lighter offline version of the app to avoid disruptions. The offline mode is limited to only critical information that an employee absolutely requires to perform their tasks.
Analytics features are necessary to monitor the app’s performance and identify potential roadblocks. Using metrics, enterprise app software engineers can release new features, update old functions, or remove some of the functionality altogether. Additionally, real-time monitoring allows the IT department to proactively resolve smaller problems to avoid snowballing.
The process of enterprise mobile app development can be notoriously long and complicated. Read our guide on the stages of mobile app development to avoid common mistakes and build a functional and well-performing enterprise solution.
Before investing time and money into enterprise mobile application development, you need to investigate which problems you are striving to solve. First and foremost, understand what users struggle with and how you can help them fulfill their duties. In later stages, this step will help you quantify the performance of the app and understand how to improve its features to meet customers’ requirements even better.
Expand your idea to list a set of features that your enterprise mobile apps need to adopt in order to successfully cover user needs. At first, brainstorm as many features as you can to then divide them between essential and non-essential features. Essential features are the ones that are the minimum required to solve the user problem. Non-essential features are directed toward making the solution more user-friendly, technically advanced, and convenient. For example, user authentication is an essential part of an application, while web-based augmented reality is a non-essential feature.
In this phase, you and other stakeholders should measure the resources available at the organization. These include budget, various specialists, hardware, software, and more. Using these findings, you can decide which enterprise mobile app developers you need to hire to fill in the skill gap.
Based on the insights from the previous stage, you can either hire in-house IT specialists or outsource your project to a software development company. For instance, if you are fully equipped but missing only one or two team members, hiring an in-house development team may be a good idea. In case your company completely lacks an enterprise mobile app development team, it’s recommended to delegate your project to a third party. Another option is staff augmentation, in which a company temporarily hires a few specialists for the duration of the project.
In this phase, you have two main options: native and cross-platform enterprise app development. Take into account the target audience and what mobile devices they use. If your company provides smartphones with the same operating system to every employee, then native enterprise mobile app development is the way to go. If there is no consistency in what devices people have, you can either build two separate mobile apps or choose a platform-agnostic approach.
While native enterprise mobile development delivers higher performance, it does come at a higher price. On average, native mobile apps cost roughly 30% more to build and launch. Cross-platform enterprise application development is more affordable and much faster as you are developing one code source for both operating systems (Android and iOS).
A project roadmap is a blueprint that will be used throughout the entire enterprise mobile app development process. Aside from listing features, this document should include mobile app architecture, major milestones, project tasks, assignees, and software and hardware specifications. In other words, it’s a comprehensive description of the project’s objectives, resources, and development time.
Wireframes are a low-fidelity version of the final product. Enterprise mobile app development companies prepare these to test the idea and visualize the application for the stakeholders. As low-budget representations of the app, wireframes do not require many resources to make and allow mobile developers to make sure they are moving in the right direction.
UI/UX design is about the feel of the enterprise mobile applications and can largely determine their success. Users nowadays are used to a certain level of usability and performance. A mobile app design needs to facilitate easy navigation and shorten learning curves. This development stage also includes A/B testing to ensure your design is aesthetically pleasing and easy to use.
Finally, you can move on to the most substantial part of the enterprise mobile app development process. In short, this entails building the frontend for the client, the backend for servers, and the admin panel to control the app. Depending on the type of mobile development you choose, you can use, for example, Swift to build an iOS app and Kotlin to create an Android solution. For cross-platform app development, you can go with Flutter, React, Xamarin, and other technologies.
Albeit a separate task, testing mostly occurs in parallel with development. Modern practices recommend building and testing in small sprints rather than waiting until all coding is complete. This is justified by the ever-increasing cost of a mistake the deeper you get in the development cycle. In the production phase, the cost of a bug is at least 30 times higher than in the coding stage. Make sure your team is extended with quality assurance engineers who can guarantee an industry level of security and performance.
Now when the enterprise application is built and tested, your team should check it against all business, user, technical, legal, and other mobile app requirements. For example, if you are working with health data, compliance with data protection laws like HIPAA is mandatory. After completing the evaluations, you can launch the application on the corresponding platforms.
Even after the launch, your enterprise apps development team is there to monitor performance, collect feedback, and continuously release new features.
The overall cost of developing enterprise applications is contingent on an array of factors, including complexity, features, tech stack, location, and team composition. On average, a custom app costs anywhere from $30,000 to $500,000. While a simple data-sharing tool can be quite affordable, a feature-dense solution with machine learning algorithms can become increasingly more expensive.
Another vital factor in the final mobile development bill is the location of your IT partner. Companies based in the US, Canada, Germany, and France charge considerably higher rates compared to their Asian, South American, and Eastern European counterparts.
In this part, we will focus on technologies that are likely to dominate the enterprise mobile app development market in the near future.
Delving into a new undertaking can be challenging and intimidating, especially when big investments are involved. Let’s take a look at some expert tips that help companies build enterprise mobile apps that deliver fruitful results.
The main takeaway from this extensive guide is that your choice of an IT partner matters. When looking for an enterprise app development vendor, pay close attention to their technical expertise, work ethic, and responsiveness. Finding a reliable partner significantly increases the chances of success. Our IT team at NIX consists of seasoned professionals with years of experience in enterprise mobile application development. We choose a client-centric approach that allows us to deliver solutions that meet customer’s needs and exceed their expectations. Get in touch with our team to discuss your idea and start your project.
With a vast background in business analysis, Roman is keen on identifying actual business challenges, defining tailored software requirements, and navigating IT projects to market success.
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