Buy vs Build: Why 3rd Party Report Tools Will Optimize Your Development Strategy

There’s no way around the time and effort required to build features from scratch. Whether or not to add a 3rd party tool to your application rather than develop in-house, is a complex decision with complex outcomes. What is right for you will likely depend on a mix of factors (budget, if it is a core or common feature, product timeline, human capital, etc.) specific to your particular organization and its goals.

Here is a summary of the ways that 3rd party tools can benefit the way you develop your application—and the reason why it’s the best choice when it comes to reporting tools, in particular.

Directly Optimizes the Development Process
Resources
The most straightforward benefit of using an existing 3rd party tool is just that—not wasting your time and resources to develop something that already exists. The obvious gain is the development hours that would have been directly invested by your team to build the tool yourselves. It also reduces staffing costs long-term, as there is no need to add tasks to your team’s workflow like maintaining codes, training team members in specific required skills, or recruiting additional developers.
Product Quality
Not only can your team refocus the time they save on the quality of your product directly, but 3rd party tool vendors are specialized in their particular tool’s function.

Vendors are contending with their own market of competitors. They have to measure up to the latest trends, and provide an unequivocal value to their customers (like you). By gaining a feature from experts focused solely on solving that particular need, you ensure consistent high product quality throughout your application.

Speed and Ease
SaaS 3rd party tools often lack a heavy installation process. The ability to complete and deliver your product to market quickly, speeds up the user-feedback process, and aligns with an Agile Methodology of development. Additionally, 3rd party tools commonly integrate with other tools. You don’t need to be limited to just one 3rd party tool if your vision calls for an even more customized solution.
Risks and The Power of Choosing Your Battles
Some unforeseen risk is unavoidable and part of the learning process in any business. The road to an optimized development process is no different. In fact, 3rd party tools can empower you to work smarter (not harder) and choose your battles strategically.

Building a tool from scratch can begin with a clear roadmap, but end with multiple reroutes, a blown budget, completely derailed timeline, and a tool that doesn’t measure up to your initial vision (or other tools on the market).

If you’re going to take risks (or should we say experiment?), let it be for on high-ticket items that can have significant pay offs, like innovative or core features that set you apart from your competitors or provide unique value to your customers.

In comparison, generic features are best gained through tools that already exist, have been tested, and streamlined. Vendors are also responsible for any possible problems with the tool, yearly updates to keep up with changes in industry, and enhancements, etc.

The less time your team is forced to use on maintaining code for your more generic features… is more time available to spare on solving roadmap hiccups elsewhere. The consequences of the unforeseen problems you do encounter, can more easily be mitigated, and the impact of risks you do decide to take can have a bit more cushion to land on.
Flexibility and Opportunity for Growth
The good thing about 3rd party tools is you are able to scale up as you grow. Pricing models are often based on the number of licenses sought. By only paying for what you need in terms of your number of users…you can grow as your customer base (and revenue) grows without sacrificing needless resources in upfront costs.

Flexibility with 3rd party tools can also come in the terms of UI/UX. Some vendors sell white-label versions that can take on your branding, and seamlessly blend with your product’s existing style and feel. Additionally, opting for embedded versions leaves users completely unaware that the 3rd party tool is not native to the rest of your application. Smaller vendors may also offer to create custom APIs, or somehow cater the tool more fully to your exact requirements.

The Cost of Opportunity and the Speed of ROI
Building from scratch involves a large capital investment and a potential gap of months (or years) between the beginning of development and seeing any revenue. Financially speaking, there are upfront costs, along with the longer-term costs of maintenance, unforeseen issues, and those related to hiring and training skilled developers to meet the needs of the project.

Obviously with a 3rd party tool, a significant proportion of these costs are circumvented, (with the aforementioned pricing models based on only paying for what you need) and gaining the ready-made tool you needed to complete and deliver your product to market within days- rather than months. Not only is the ROI greater, but it comes with a significantly faster speed than in-house development would.

The cost of development is not only vastly less with 3rd party tools, but there is also an opportunity cost to developing in-house to consider. For example, what could 100 hours have been used to create of it hadn’t been wasted? What could those 4 developers have created in 6 months if they had been assigned to a different project instead?

What Makes 3rd Party SaaS Reporting Tools a Significantly Unique Case?
Most applications need to have some sort of data visualization available for users to view and interpret their own data. The skills required to be able to write the code for a reporting tool (allowing applications to create reports, or display data in grids, charts, and dashboards for their users) is often underestimated.

Normally with software development, we deal with highly complex codes that gather a small amount of data at time. However, reporting involves writing (seemingly) simple codes that gather a huge amount of data at once (possibly millions of rows of data!). Although the code may be simple, a sub-optimal code can lead to major issues, and slow the entire application down to a complete halt for all tenants. Coding errors carry much greater consequences on product performance, while skillful writing can make a huge impact on overall efficiency.

This is exactly why acquiring a 3rd party reporting tool is such an advantage. Specialized in reporting capabilities, their developers are experts in the nuances of data collection, and can ensure seamless operation. This advantage comes on top of robust reporting features, speedy integration, and all the common advantages of choosing to buy a 3rd party tool, of course.

WRAP-UP
We hope this article has helped you to better understand the benefits of employing a 3rd party tool vs building one from scratch, and why using a 3rd party SaaS report tool provides a unique advantage.

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