Business Processes
In building small business apps, a developer is endeavoring to model or support a business process.
To realize the maximum potential for small business application development, the developer needs to take on the role of analyzing the business process.
To keep up a supply of new work, the developer needs to identify potential new projects and development opportunities.
The key skill to being able to identify opportunities for new apps is an understanding of how businesses work. Study business processes.
Take courses on business management and management accounts. Checkout SBIC library and other libraries. It helps you to identify the best opportunities to improve business processes.
To be successful, build successful business apps. A business application is successful when an application generates a profit. Demonstrate that you can increase their profits. How do small applications generate profit? There are three ways to generate more profit within a business.
1. Increase sales by either increasing the number of sales or increasing the revenue from each sale (or less easily, both)
2. Reduce what it costs you to sell.
3. Spend as little as you can on the parts of the business that generate the least profit and minimize any resources given over to loss making activities.
Business apps can address all of these profit opportunities. Most businesses try to increase profits by increasing sales. It is usually far easier to increase profits by reducing costs and minimizing the time spent on loss making activities. It is in these areas that most opportunities for small business apps arise.
Here is some areas where opportunities for small applications arise:
1. Automate Simple Repetitive Jobs
A simple way to reduce costs is to reduce the time it takes to carry out repetitive tasks. Ex: CFO was spending 4 hours running reports. I created an application which generated the report in 5 minutes. That single simple application has saved 100s of hours of work, thereby freeing up the CFO to do more revenue generating work.
2. Rapid and Detailed Reporting
Actively go out and identify the opportunities that can be found within any business. Develop the skills to identify the opportunities for new apps. To do that successfully and repeatedly, you must learn to identify business processes that can be simplified, made more effective and efficient via a small app.
