Today, we live in an age of connections. People make digital connections with others and the brands they love around the world every day. But what do all these connections have to do with modern enterprises? As it turns out, a whole lot. The fact is, every enterprise can benefit from tapping into this enormous stream of real-time data. How? Through the power of enterprise app development.
Enterprise App Development Defined
Defining enterprise app development is fairly straightforward: it’s the process of creating applications for enterprise-sized businesses, specifically customized to meet their business needs. Once complete, these apps can then be deployed to the necessary platforms and devices.
The point of developing any enterprise application is to solve common pain points and provide users with an efficient and easy way to perform tasks. Enterprise apps often automate certain functions and workflows to help users work faster. What’s more, these apps have the ability to store, process, and manage large amounts of data, and provide business solutions based on the insights gathered.
No matter the goal, speed and scalability are critical to the process of developing apps for enterprises. Because of the complexity of workflows and the data gathered, building components that can scale at the beginning of the process will establish a path to a more successful end product. And the faster an app can be integrated and updated, the more likely it will be to meet – and exceed – expectations.
3 Common Categories of Enterprise Mobile Apps
Employee Level
The most basic category of enterprise mobile apps include things used by employees internally for managing communications and workflow. Applications in this category often have minimal features but allow managers to track project status. Apps like these provide a smoother workflow and offer real-time updates.
A well-known example of an employee-level enterprise app is the messaging app Slack. While offering communication speeds much faster than email, Slack provides more integrations than any other platform to its 10+ million active daily users. What’s more, with over 40% of Fortune 100 businesses using it, Slack has become the go-to tool for maximizing productivity.
Department Level
This next category of enterprise applications help the workflow of departments. For example, department level apps aid employees who perform similar tasks, like marketing or sales. Through these apps, executives can monitor productivity and manage entire departments.
CRMs are a great example of this kind of enterprise application for sales management. Most CRMs systematically log sales activity – like emails, calls, or meetings – and provide a snapshot of the entire department’s work.
Enterprise Level
The final category of enterprise apps is for connecting all the departments of a business in a single network – from employees to managers to executives. In this case, the goal for enterprise level apps is often to simplify the distribution and automation of work. This is done by providing everyone with all the necessary documents.
One example of this might be an inventory management app. Apps like these can track items across locations while monitoring both incoming and outgoing products. This helps to keep stock levels reasonable. What’s more, this kind of app can alert users when demand rises, and stock levels drop.
Enterprise App Features
When preparing for your enterprise app development process, it’s important to keep essential features like these in mind:
Automation
Regardless of which level your app will fulfill, all effective enterprise mobile apps help to manage and automate repetitive tasks. Through automation, you can save the user steps, helping them to complete their work faster, more accurately, and more efficiently.
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Depending on what you hope to accomplish with your app, there is the possibility of it needing to process massive amounts of data and provide insights from that data. Today, there is no better way to handle these sorts of tasks than with AI and machine learning. The utilization of these technologies not only helps apps continually automate processes, but they also help the app improve itself, and offers greater insights into the app’s performance.
Data Management
All enterprise applications, regardless of their level, must handle a lot of data. For this reason, an effective data management strategy, as well as analytics and intelligent automation are critical. Having the ability to leverage this data and its insights lead to better employee decision-making.
IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of physical objects that are connected to, and exchange data with each other and the internet. This includes, for example, a vast array of “smart” devices, like refrigerators, watches, fire alarms, door locks, security systems, fitness trackers, medical sensors, and much more. Enterprise mobile apps that use IoT devices to monitor tasks and operations in a well-built and secure environment offer further insights and can make processes run even more smoothly.
Security
In today’s world of seemingly constant data breaches, security is always top of mind. All modern mobile apps should have security baked into the development process. This is especially true for enterprise mobile apps, given the amount of information that passes through them. Starting the development process with security as a priority, ensures you prevent and defend against future breaches.
Emerging Tech
One of the hallmarks of technology is that it continues to evolve. That means you need to keep up and ensure that your apps’ functionality and compatibility continues to evolve as well. In order to achieve this, your application needs to easily interface with new emerging technologies – or at least be easily updated so it can. This ensures a shorter development time for future versions.
The Cost of Enterprise App Development
How much your enterprise app will cost to develop, depends a great deal on its functionalities, project requirements, and type of app you want to build; this makes cost highly variable.
That said, you can calculate an estimate of your enterprise app development cost with this very simple equation:
Total Enterprise Mobile App Development Cost = Development Time x Cost/Hour
While this will only yield a basic estimation, it is a reliable tool when discussing costs, deciding on budgets, and choosing a development partner.
Choosing an App Development Partner
Whoever you choose to help you develop your application will play a critical role in the process. Ideally, you’ll want to partner with a team that has several years of experience, knowledgeable developers, and an eye for detail.
You’ll want to choose a company that is willing to work with your specific requirements and will create a tailor-made solution to help improve your business model. What’s more, you may want to consider a team that has the ability to work with a broad range of technologies and has experience in a variety of fields. In turn, this helps ensure a holistic approach to solving your company’s pain points.
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