4 Questions to Determine the Real Cost of Homegrown Job Scheduling Software

Cost of Homegrown Job Scheduling Software

Faced with a global pandemic and economic uncertainty, companies are taking a hard look at how they’re doing business. Budgets are getting tighter and resources are being stretched thin as they look for ways to make their processes more efficient and save costs. Companies that had originally opted for homegrown job scheduling software because of the low upfront costs are having to decide if it’s worth it to continue investing time and money into these solutions. The current climate is exposing the weaknesses of homegrown solutions and the hidden costs that add up beyond the price tag of a professional solution.

As you weigh the investment of maintaining your homegrown solution versus an enterprise job scheduler, consider these four questions:

1. How Much Time Will You Spend?

Whatever money your company saved by building your own job scheduler, has certainly been made up for in what you’ve spent in time. The time it takes to get your software built and up and running is only half the battle. There’s also the time your developers spend maintaining the system and being their own support staff, leading to trade-offs with other projects. Developers often become one with their software in these cases and what happens when developers leave? If your homegrown utility is not properly documented—as is often the case—the remaining staff can’t keep up with day-to-day operation or maintenance.

Custom scheduling applications end up consuming more hours of staff time than they save and keep your most talented (and highly paid) IT workers stuck submitting and monitoring jobs rather than working on more strategic projects.

2. Is It Ready to Scale?

IT environments are becoming more and more complex. While homegrown solutions might be effective for smaller organizations with limited processes to run, for bigger and growing businesses, they may lead to headaches down the road. Even in this moment of uncertainty, when your business starts to grow again, you need to ensure your job scheduling solution can scale with you and handle the complexities of your IT environment.

For example, if your company suddenly hits a boom in business and all your orders need to go through the web and orders have increased by 100 percent, would your homegrown scheduler be able to keep up? Or if you need to merge business units or acquire another company, will your software be able to meet the moment? As your organization and its processes grow and evolve, homegrown solutions can quickly become obsolete, or at the very least underpowered.

3. Is It Error-Free and Secure?

A job scheduler isn’t just an IT project. Rather, it’s a business application that requires disciplined development. And the process of maintaining a homegrown scheduler is complex and prone to human errors. These errors often lead to re-runs and downtime, leaving your staff to put in overtime hours to correct the issues and taking them from their more value-adding assignments. Sadly, even the tiniest error, overlooked detail, or incorrect code can cost your company big.

Homegrown solutions also often lack proper security to keep your company’s information safe. With so much time spent on development and maintenance, securing your homegrown scheduler often takes a back seat. And in reality, scheduling applications deserve some of the highest security considerations since they often use administrative credentials to execute critical processes.

4. Will It Play Well With Others?

Software is meant to make life easier. And in IT, where there is already an overwhelming pressure to keep your company’s infrastructure running smoothly, building and maintaining a scheduler that offers full functionality and integrates with your other critical business applications is an uphill battle. If your developers are already time crunched and trying to get a solution off the ground, they may need to cut corners and leave out vital features.

It’s already hard to integrate custom tools with business applications and other new technology. And it only gets harder as your other business software and platforms upgrade to versions with increased complexity and capability. Your homegrown scheduler can quickly become ineffective. And updating your own software to acceptable standards just leads to more time and costs.

Save Time, Money, and Stress with an Enterprise Job Scheduler

After considering the down-the-road costs, incredible amount of time, and the headaches a homegrown scheduler can bring, consider an enterprise job scheduler. An enterprise job scheduler, like JAMS from Fortra, can get up and running quickly, gives you the full functionality and features you need, and can help you streamline and avoid complications with the IT workflow across your enterprise.

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