If you’ve ever invested in a SaaS product for your business, you may have looked into customizations. This can be any feature, modification, or extension made to the existing product functionality, that is not prebuilt by developers and instead requires custom development.
SaaS applications can’t be modified by building customizations that include changing the core product. Instead, the best approach is to use SaaS applications in the most standardized way possible, reducing costs and complexity.
SaaS ERP software appeals to many companies because of the perceived reduction in support costs. However, some organizations considering SaaS ERP may find a system isn’t a perfect fit and begin looking into customization. Company leaders should be aware of customization’s advantages and disadvantages before embarking on it.
Customized SaaS ERP
Some companies decide that the out-of-the-box SaaS ERP system is insufficient for their business needs and move forward with customization. Customization involves developing additional integrations, tools and reports or making some system changes. For example, a manufacturer may decide to customize some of their SaaS ERP inventory forms to provide support for additional custom fields that track specific items such as allergens, unit of measure or expiration date.
However, one disadvantage of customizing SaaS ERP is the process length. In addition, when the ERP vendor releases new updates, the updates may conflict with a company’s custom code. When ERP vendors release new software versions, third-party integrators must often scramble to test their code and functionality with the newer versions. While this usually happens over a long time, allowing users and vendors to test and upgrade their code, application errors and crashes can occur due to unsupported code.
Companies considering SaaS ERP customization should also look into the costs of code changes. Code changes generally require integration vendors that develop and support the customization.
