Software tools everywhere, but none of them talking to each other

Across the landscape of small and medium businesses, especially in areas like manufacturing, there’s a wealth of very clever, very niche software tools. For a business doing specialised work, they are often indispensable aids. But you’ve probably never heard of any of them. 

Niche software – some examples

Here’s an example: a piece of software that takes a few photographs of a pile of timber and tells you not only the number of pieces of wood but also their dimensions. For a sawmill it’s an incredibly useful bit of kit. For almost any other business, it’s of no interest. 

Software systems like this abound. Although most of us have never heard of them, in particular sectors they are vital tools. 

Not all of them are as specific as the timber counting tool. In the performing arts sector, theatres use a software tool such as Artifax to manage their bookings, handling complicated details of performance dates, different types of tickets, audience capacity, pricing, customer data, and much more. Outside the sector the software is unknown.

Sometimes the software is integrated into a piece of equipment. In the metal casting industry, foundries produce metal castings by melting metal in furnaces and pouring it into moulds. The furnace comes with software that tells you what’s going on inside – the temperature, the quantity of molten metal, the number of castings being produced in the current batch. It’s vital software for controlling the furnace. It has one job to do, and that’s all it does. 

The niche software integration opportunity

These are clever, niche tools. But there’s a problem – a real and growing problem. As other software systems proliferate in business, especially central business management systems, they typically don’t talk to these niche tools. The data these tools contain is useful on its own but when you take it into the context of all your other data, its usefulness becomes far greater.  

Take the software that controls the furnace. If you connect it up to a wider system, suddenly you can connect the data about each specific batch with wider shop floor data – the batch of raw materials, the time of day, the operator, the size of the order, the number of castings that failed quality control. This then allows you to correlate key metrics like production rates or product quality with different variables – who is operating the machine, the number of castings. This feeds directly into understanding your productivity and the factors that affect it.  

The power of sharing complex data

Or take the theatre bookings software. Even though this is actually a big, widely used system – not that niche at all – there are only a limited number of ways its data can be used beyond its core function of scheduling events. But all that data about performances, dates and prices is exactly the same data you need when you come to create a printed listing guide, as venues typically do every six months or less. If you could extract that data, half the listings guide would write itself. 

That function is exactly what we’ve built for London’s South Bank Centre. Our custom software pulls the data from the bookings system and into an automated layout tool that rapidly creates print-ready InDesign files.

As for the app that counts and measures the pieces of timber, if it was integrated into a business system a timber merchant would now instantly be able to upload the details into their stock control system or delivery system, knowing with certainty that the details are correct.     

Make your tools contribute to the bigger picture

Each software application has a direct set of benefits: the job it’s meant to do. But if you take a strategic view, you can see how these applications can contribute to your IT systems’ bigger picture goals – greater transparency on costs, efficiencies across the production process, smarter ways of working. A mature IT set up should give you an overview across all your software tools. 

The problem is often that precisely because these systems are typically so niche, there is no standard way of integrating them into any larger software system. You need a custom solution to reap the benefits of integration. That’s an area where we have proven experience – from theatre booking systems to timber apps and beyond.