Why Buy Rather Than Build

Jan. 27, 2009 - PRLog -- Cost & Time
There is considerable cost and time required to develop and test an internally built system. Ensuring that the system includes all desired capabilities such as the below can constitute many man years of effort to perfect and implement:

•Graphical representation of all business processes.
•Workflow modelling for those business processes including business
rule management, scheduling of activities and escalation procedures.
•Maintaining an audit trail of all data.
•Encompassing a security model that caters for all roles across the
organisation.
•Quantification and reporting of all business processes information.
•Interfaces to external applications.

Whilst building an application internally, an organisation may be forced to forego other business improvement opportunities and unknowingly expose itself to undue regulatory and legislative risks. As such, time can be saved by outsourcing the development of a system, though the cost, management and potential cultural difference challenges associated with outsourcing need to be taken into consideration.

Staffing
When building a complete application, an organisation must consider staffing requirements. The development and testing of an application requires skill sets that are often outside the operation range of an IT department. Therefore, an organisation must factor in labour costs associated with finding, hiring, training and retaining people to achieve appropriate skill sets.

Staffing applies to any development effort. However, there is the added level of expertise required to develop an EHS & Risk Management system. Often an organisation requiring such a system will benefit from EHS & Risk Management best practices and require resources not available within their own organisation to ensure that the application is successfully delivered and deployed.

Expertise
One of the key advantages of buying an EHS & Risk Management solution over building one internally is that the organisation can leverage on the expertise of the vendor.

This advantage is materialised from the human resources available from the vendor as well as the experience that the vendor possess with having worked with many clients across diverse industries. This means that the organisation avoids the costs involved in recruiting required experts in-house.

The vendor may also be equipped with best practices knowledge based on recognised industry standards that has been successfully tried and tested by various organisations from diverse industries and/or geographic locations. Such transferrable lessons learned maybe invaluable to the purchaser.

Ongoing Support
Building an EHS & Risk Management solution internally also means that an organisation will not benefit from external support when problems emerge. Likewise, there will not be any ongoing support from a vendor to maintain and enhance the application as the organisation or environment (e.g. legislation),
changes. All of these issues must be managed internally by your organisation.

Updates and enhancements can result in further delays to the delivery time of the internally built application and consequently, increased costs. Given this, the total cost of ownership over time can be very difficult to determine, further compounded by the fact that even during the initial development phase, enhancements and changes are common.

Buying an EHS & Risk Management software solution means that the organization has access to both technical support and software upgrades when the vendor updates their offering with further enhancements or new functionalities.

Time to Deployment
The time to deployment when purchasing an EHS & Risk Management solution is considerably quicker than building your own application from scratch. The system will need to be customised to the needs of the organisation. However, such configurations are typically measured in weeks or months as opposed to the months or years it might take to build a system internally.

Purchasing an EHS & Risk Management solution as opposed to building one internally means that an organisation can begin to benefit from the facilities that application offers almost immediately. Ultimately, this will improve transparency and assist your organisation to proactively measure, manage and improve overall business performance in a timely and cost-effective manner.

SOLUTION
CINTELLATE™ EHS & Risk Management software is a convenient one-stop solution which addresses not only the fundamental incident and risk modules, but also extensive business-related processes such as Emissions Management, Audit and Inspection processes and Action Management. These processes are easily stackable and integrated whilst being supported by a common platform. This coupled with the versatility of CINTELLATE™ in meeting the unique client requirements and needs provide a key advantage in the deployment of the solution.

CINTELLATE™ software is fully configurable and can be tailored to meet the needs of organisations across diverse industries in a user-friendly way. It has been developed to such a high degree of flexibility that permits clients themselves to configure and customise the system or alternatively, rely on our team of
dedicated consultants to assist in the change process.

CINTELLATE™ is the result of years of effort and is currently deployed as the 5th generation of software. Through these generations, the software has been developed and refined to become the leading EHS & Risk management software solution that it is today.

Furthermore, CINTELLATE™ has established a proven implementation methodology and process. This is based on years of deployment and implementation experience across diverse sectors and a project management team who is dedicated to driving the process.

By investing in this application, organisations are taking advantage of the in-depth expertise CINTELLATE™ holds in the areas of EHS & Risk Management and other business-related processes.

The risks involved in building an application internally are therefore mitigated and budgeted funds can be redirected towards other business opportunities.

BENEFITS
CINTELLATE™ has been delivering EHS & Risk Management solutions for 15 years. It has a comprehensive range of clients including some of the world’s largest companies. Our existing clients span such industries as:

•Mining
•Oil and Gas
•Energy and Utilities
•Engineering
•Construction
•Manufacturing

With a broad spectrum of clients ensures that our product offering covers a multitude of business processes.

CINTELLATE™ can help companies achieve their goal of developing in a sustainable manner, above and beyond the traditional, financially-focused mechanisms. It achieves this by integrating the management of corporate sustainability activities within its business processes as part of daily operational activities and ensures that performance relative to non-financial objectives can be reported on a real-time basis.