3 Reasons Not to Homebrew your CAD Integration Solution
Don’t regret choosing to custom develop your integration!
Reason 1 – It’s more expensive than you think
It’s alluring to think that you’re saving money when you’re not being invoiced for a CAD-integration project. In reality, homebrew development takes time, time is money, and it’s much more money than the cost of CADLink.
Here are the time-consuming steps to build your homebrew solution:
- Scope definition – figuring out what you even want to do
- Development – are you going to hire an additional resource?
- User testing – people who are already busy now have an additional task
- Troubleshooting/Bug-fixing – inevitable
- Training
- Iterating steps 3-5 – happens until you have a “functional” solution
Wouldn’t you rather the time and effort be put back to generating company revenue instead?
QBuild Software has done CAD integrations for 15 years. We can confidently say our CADLink implementations are optimized to take less time and cost less in time savings than any homebrew solution.
Reason 2 – If you thought you hated upgrades…
Let’s say you do get through the 6 steps and get up and running with your homebrew solution. Your next hurdles are upgrades. Instead of remaining fluid with your system upgrades, your homebrew solution will not be future-proofed against CAD and ERPs’ ever-changing database schemas, APIs, and web services.
We have seen clients with systems outdated by over 10 years due to the custom development they didn’t want to move away from. In a fast-paced tech landscape, are you going to stay on top of your competitors using 10-year-old technology? QBuild, being partners with all the major CAD and ERP providers on the market, receive releases of the software ahead of public release, and the support from their technical groups to keep our tools up to date. What this means is while you will be blowing the dust off your homebrewed code to start building upgrades, QBuild will have tested, and be ready to deploy upgrades to our customers.
Reason 3 – Turnovers will be catastrophic
So now you’ve gone through the 6 steps and have a working solution. You’ve even survived an upgrade after your developer worked overtime to work on the code. The unthinkable happens, the developer who built and maintains the code leaves your company and the homebrew solution is now orphaned.
Nobody wants to develop on orphaned code, everyone knows it’s much easier to build new code than maintain existing code (especially if it resembled spaghetti!). Now you’re all the way back to step 1 – Scope Definition.
QBuild has been in business for over 15 years, having grown every year. This year, we’ve reached the 1000 customer mark, and now expanding to new territories in Europe and Asia. You can trust us to continue supporting our solution.
