Your Guide to Enterprise Software Development: Cases, Components, Concerns

Enterprise software is the foundation that helps large organizations run smoothly. Not your typical off-the-shelf app, these robust, often custom-built systems are designed to meet the complex needs of entire organizations. Whether it's handling customer data, managing supply chains, or overseeing financial operations, enterprise solutions bring everything together and keep things running smoothly.

So, how do you go about enterprise software development? After all, custom enterprise software has high security, functionality, and scalability requirements. This is what we’re going to explain in this article. We will also focus on the key components and stages of developing enterprise software. Most importantly, we will discuss the best practices for enterprise app development. So, if you’re considering building custom enterprise software for your organization, read until the end.

What is Enterprise Software Development?

Enterprise software is a computer application designed to bring efficiency to large-scale organizations' critical operations and processes. These business apps usually have numerous users, scale as the business grows, and integrate with other solutions. 

You’ll find many different types of enterprise systems designed to cater to various business areas, including sales, marketing, customer service, project management, supply chain management, finance, and human resources. These solutions can be classified based on their use cases.

Use cases

Enterprise software delivery often comes in the form of function-specific, customizable applications. These are some of the most popular types of enterprise solutions.

Customer relationship management (CRM) system

CRM software makes tracking and managing interactions with prospective and existing customers much easier. This type of enterprise solution collects data from multiple sources to give users visibility into the entire customer lifecycle. This information can later be used to improve customer relationships and experience at every stage in the buyer’s journey, from the first time they hear about the brand to their first and subsequent purchases. 

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system

ERP systems integrate a company’s key business processes into a single platform. They improve the way companies manage their day-to-day operations, including planning, procurement, purchasing, warehousing, manufacturing, and supply chain.

Supply chain management (SCM) system

As the name suggests, SCM software streamlines supply chain processes end-to-end. Businesses often use it to align production levels with customer demand, manage work-in-process inventory, and coordinate the transportation of raw materials and finished goods. 

Financial management software

Managing assets, income, and expenses is much more efficient when companies have all the information they need in a single financial management system (not dozens of Excel files). Forget about manual data gathering. These systems offer a convenient platform for creating, editing, and storing financial transactions. Plus, they minimize computation errors and keep a record of audit trails.

Project management software

Simply put, these applications allow planning, executing, and tracking project progress. Project management software brings structure to complex plans and strategies, helping project managers assign tasks, monitor different teams' performance, and ensure the progress aligns with the company’s strategic goals. Some of these applications also come with internal communication and productivity tools.

Collaboration software

Collaboration software is an app that allows companies and teams to communicate and work together on shared tasks. It makes it easy for team members to share information and files, work on the same versions of documents, and send out cat pictures to the whole office in just one click (kidding!).

Customer service software

Companies that offer client support make good use of customer service software. These applications (and sometimes even platforms) can organize client issues and queries using a ticketing system, collect customer requests from different channels (chat, email, phone), and keep an internal database of guides and other helpful materials for operators.

Of all these enterprise systems, CRM software is proving to be the most popular. It’s dominating the market with its projected 2024 market volume of $89.03 billion. An even more noteworthy trend is enhancing enterprise software with artificial intelligence.

AI Integration in Enterprise Software Engineering

Enterprises are very AI-curious. The moment artificial intelligence stepped out of the lab and into the business world, enterprises rushed to see how they could use it. And now, more and more enterprise software is infused with AI to help companies improve operations, automate content creation, streamline customer service, personalize marketing campaigns, and much more.

AI-powered customer insights

AI-powered analytics tools can give enterprises the insights they need to understand their customers' preferences and behavior patterns better. They often come with a marketing automation platform that organizes this data, tracks metrics, generates reports, and so on. With this information at hand, clients can get personalized treatment while businesses can make smarter decisions. 

Smart CRM systems

AI-powered CRM systems bring additional benefits in addition to the functions of regular CRM software. This includes predictive analytics to see which leads are most likely to convert, personalized interactions with leads and clients, sales process automation (like sending out AI-generated emails), more accurate lead scoring, and more.

Intelligent document processing

Intelligent document processing tools allow enterprises to manage the large volumes of documents they process more efficiently. For one, they automatically extract, classify, and process data from various types of documents, including PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, and documents printed on paper. They also minimize errors and long work hours that often come with manual data management.

Virtual assistants and chatbots

AI-powered virtual assistants can comprehend natural language much better. They don’t just look for keywords or follow rigid scripts like regular chatbots—they actually understand the context, meaning, and intent behind what users say, prompting more fluid, human-like conversations. Plus, they can detect sentiment, remember and refer back to previous conversations, are better equipped to handle unclear questions, and can improve over time thanks to machine learning capabilities.

AI-based chatbots with SQL access

If you haven’t heard of them, chatbots with SQL access are automated systems that can interact with users using a chat and directly access and query a database using SQL. These chatbots allow users to request data or perform database operations without needing to write SQL queries themselves.

An AI-powered chatbot can understand natural language queries and translate them into SQL statements. Thanks to this feature, business analysts, customer support agents, HRs, financial specialists, and non-technical users can query the database too.

AI-driven workflow automation

AI-driven workflow automation allows companies to streamline various business processes by minimizing human input. Historical data, patterns, and predictive analytics make decision-making easier, dynamic task management allows automatically reassigning, delegating, or reprioritizing tasks based on real-time data, while complex workflows with many variables, dependencies, and decision points become more manageable.

Machine learning for risk management

Thanks to smart risk management tools, businesses can understand patterns and anomalies to identify and assess the different types of risks they might encounter. These applications can be used to prioritize incidents, take immediate action on the most critical ones, continuously monitor risk factors, automatically execute mitigation strategies, and adapt to evolving risks.

Real-time data analytics and visualization

AI-powered data analytics and visualization tools collect, process, and analyze data even better than traditional ones. They can integrate data from diverse sources in real time, provide context-aware analytics, detect anomalies, dynamically adjust visualizations, and scale as data volume grows—which is very important for an expanding enterprise.

The AI tools you add to your company’s enterprise system will primarily depend on your business needs. The development team can help you determine the requirements to include in your enterprise software projects, but we’ll discuss this later. 

Before that, let’s take a closer look at why enterprise software product development is worth the trouble. 

Why is Enterprise Software Important?

Despite economic challenges, 61% of organizations plan to spend more on software, says Gartner. This is because they know enterprise application development is a strategic investment that can result in significant ROI in the long run. Enterprise solutions can bring actual results, including:

Scaled resources

Enterprise software allows companies to maximize the use of their resources by improving efficiency in all areas of business operations. When designed and developed correctly, enterprise software is modular, flexible, and highly customizable, allowing businesses to add new systems and scale the existing ones as needed. 

Automated workflows

Unsurprisingly, automated workflows reduce manual work, especially when they’re tailored to the needs and goals of specific enterprises. Using workflow automation software brings improved accuracy, predictable outputs, better collaboration, regular compliance checks, and much more.

Enhanced employee productivity

Employees from different departments can benefit from smart enterprise software to improve productivity: human resource management, accounting and finance, supply chain management, IT, legal, and more. Let’s take marketing specialists, for example. Instead of starting from scratch, they can build on the AI-generated ideas and create a complete campaign plan much more quickly. They can also create automated outbound and inbound marketing workflows to execute the plan.

Improved organizational efficiency

Enterprise software combines many systems, allowing employees to manage work from one centralized location. It also improves collaboration across teams, preventing silos between departments. 

Support for decision-making

A centralized database your enterprise software can center around gives companies the insights they need to make decisions. With enough information and the right solution, spotting trends, predicting demand, identifying opportunities, and mitigating risks becomes easier. Access to real-time data allows businesses to capture sales opportunities as they arise and manage threats before they cause damage. 

Reduced operational costs

Automation of repetitive tasks, streamlined operations, smart resource allocation, fewer errors, improved collaboration, automated compliance tracking—all these enterprise software functions save companies operational costs in the long run.

Critical Components of Enterprise-Level Software Development

Built for various use cases, enterprise software may come in many different forms. You can, of course, choose the integrations and add-ons based on your company’s unique needs. You can even resort to building custom enterprise software from scratch. However, enterprise systems should have the following essential components: 

Scalable software architecture

Enterprise software is usually built on a complex architecture that can load massive amounts of data and accommodate large user volumes. The system architect should make room for custom components and complex tools for different departments. On top of that, the solution should have thorough and detailed documentation for future developments. After all, updating, maintaining, and building enterprise software often takes years. 

Intuitive user interface

Enterprise software must be as easy to navigate as it is sophisticated. This means ensuring the interface remains user-friendly no matter how many integrations you add. If the system is secure enough, it can be a cloud solution with a single sign-on capability so users can access it anywhere. An intuitive user interface will also increase the adoption rates of the system since new software is only useful if employees actually use it. 

Integration capabilities

Centralization is an important feature of enterprise software, and integration capabilities make it possible. The development team may use APIs, middleware solutions, and web services to allow an enterprise system to connect with other systems internally and externally. 

Security measures

Data breaches cost businesses an average of $4.88 million in 2024. On the flip side,  organizations that extensively use AI-powered security features make an average of $2.22 million in cost savings. 

Businesses must adopt a security-first approach when building enterprise software. This means prioritizing security at every stage of the enterprise system development process and preventing risks rather than reacting to them.

Scalability and customizability

Businesses always aim for growth. And they need enterprise software that can grow with them. Companies should be able to scale the system as needed, increasing its workloads, database, and user volumes. They should also be able to customize it, making the necessary tweaks that will accommodate any operational changes. 

Beyond knowing what to include in your custom software, as a manager, you should also understand the development process. That way, you can be involved in the project more proactively. 

Enterprise Software Development Stages

Enterprise systems come in many shapes and forms, but their development process generally takes a similar route. Regular software development follows many of the same steps, however, the details will differ. You can expect your development project to go through the following stages:

Requirement analysis and planning

The development team works with the stakeholders to understand the business goals and reasons for developing the software, after which they determine and document the requirements. Once they have a clear picture, they can start drawing up a project roadmap. This involves identifying deliverables, setting schedules, and estimating costs. 

System design and architecture

This step helps ensure the custom software is scalable, reliable, and maintainable. It involves choosing the right architecture (monolithic, microservices, service-oriented), designing the system for horizontal scaling, selecting the database, designing APIs, introducing DevOps practices, and more.

Development 

This is the most technical and time-consuming stage of the enterprise software development process. On top of selecting an appropriate tech stack and coding the solution according to industry standards, the process involves iterative planning (if the project follows Agile methodologies), testing (manual and automated), bug fixing, and setting up the CI/CD pipeline.

Integration and testing

In the integration and testing (I&T) stage, enterprise software developers test different modules as a combined unit. These modules are commonly coded separately by different programmers, so the goal of I&T is to check for any defects, ensuring the modules function well as they interact with each other. 

Deployment and implementation

At this stage, the custom software is integrated into the company’s business operations. The deployment and implementation processes may involve taking the system online, connecting it with third-party software, and signing up users.

User training and documentation

During this stage, help the users—your employees—get used to the new system. The development team should prepare some kind of user guide people can read to learn about the system’s installation process and features. Ideally, there should be a person (or team) users can ask for help while they’re warming up to the new software.

Maintenance and support

The development team must ensure the software is running smoothly after the deployment. They have to maintain the system, make necessary updates, fix bugs, and generally troubleshoot when problems arise. As the system grows and the number of users increases, it will need more memory and computing power, so the developers need to take that into account, too.

Evaluation and optimization

At this post-implementation stage, you have to ensure the software meets the initial project requirements and objectives. If some areas need improvement (like usability or performance), developers should optimize them.

Best Practices for Enterprise Software Development

Enterprise software development is no walk in the park. The development team must have relevant expertise and plenty of experience to get it done. In addition, the following practices increase the chances that the tech team will build your enterprise software successfully:

Define clear objectives and scope

The project objectives must be results-oriented and quantifiable. For instance, clearly stating that you want the custom software to reduce drop-off rates by 15% (instead of just saying you want to increase sales) will help the development team determine the software capabilities that can achieve that goal.

Clearly stated objectives will also help developers stay aligned with the company’s business goals, ensuring the tasks, deliverables, and timelines are within the project scope. 

Engage stakeholders early and often

Of course, the developers must work closely with the stakeholders to make sure the results align with the company’s business goals. But the collaboration doesn’t end here—the stakeholders must also get regular updates. This will create a feedback loop designed to nip issues in the bud before they become big problems that may be too costly to fix. 

Adopt Agile methodologies

Agile involves an iterative process that makes it easy for the development team to respond to stakeholders’ feedback. Usually, in Agile, developers show stakeholders small demos every two weeks at the end of each sprint. These bi-weekly milestone releases ensure the deliverables get frequently validated, any changes are made quickly, and all teams involved are on the same page.

Prioritize User Experience (UX)

Enterprise software is too big of an investment for people not to use it. This is why user experience should be a priority during the development process. The UX should simplify workflows and work seamlessly across devices. User journey mapping and storyboarding can help create an interface that’s straightforward and intuitive.

Focus on scalability and flexibility

Enterprise software must have the scaling capacity to accommodate business growth or seasonal peaks without delays or downtime. The development team can adopt different strategies to make this happen, including:

• Database sharing: distributing data across several nodes
• Horizontal scaling: using containerization to increase application instances
• Asynchronous processing: allowing higher limits per context
• Caching: temporarily ​​storing frequently accessed data

Optimize for performance

One key difference between enterprise software and other solutions is its magnitude and almost unlimited resources. But the development team must still optimize the ​​enterprise software’s processing efficiency to prevent instability or delays, especially as usage increases. Besides, there are numerous ways to tune up system performance, from profiling code by identifying memory leaks to monitoring health parameters by setting and tracking key metrics.

Maintain comprehensive documentation

The documentation contains statements of what the enterprise software can do and how it works. It should be as comprehensive and detailed as possible to avoid confusion or ambiguity. But it should also not be so complex that it’s hard to comprehend. Ideally, a technical writer would prepare all the documentation and guides, but if you don’t have one on the team, at least use a single, consistent template for keeping information brief and structured.

Adopt DevOps and CI/CD

An essential part of the DevOps culture, CI/CD practices streamline code development and deployment. According to them, engineers should continuously feed their code changes into a central repository (CI). Each update is then automatically tested and automatically delivered to specified infrastructure environments (CD).

Conclusion

Custom-built enterprise solutions help big organizations with dozens of departments and hundreds of employees operate like clockwork. They can be tuned to the goals and preferences of each organization and even meet the needs of individual departments.

Enterprise software comes with so many nuts and bolts and takes so long to build that it has to be developed by true professionals. ElifTech offers just the software development services you’re looking for. Get in touch with us and start building custom enterprise software now.