It may be tempting to replace your messy web of Excel spreadsheets with a custom software that you coded with AI instead of committing to an ERP.
AI has made building your own software easier than ever, but that doesn’t mean you should. Here’s a breakdown of the true cost of building in-house supply chain software:
- Reliability – software companies have teams that make sure your software is reliable, bug-free, and can handle volume; supply chain and financial data has a lot of volume. A product you build with AI hasn’t been battle-tested with real data across organizations. It might not have been built for scale. It doesn’t come with site reliability engineers that will be responding at 4am when the server goes down. It doesn’t come with security specialists that make sure your financial data is secure.
- Maintenance Costs – we’re not just talking your AI subscription fees and github costs. There’s server costs, data storage, error logs, and more. More importantly, you lose the compounding value of experience that your software vendor has from talking to thousands of customers troubleshooting the same issues. Edge cases, new use cases, user feedback; all of this takes time and volume to learn from. If you build it yourself, you can only learn from your own use cases and solutions are restrained to your team’s bandwidth.
- Opportunity Cost – instead of solving problems your team was hired to solve and uniquely qualified to solve, they’ll be troubleshooting server errors and database exceptions they’ve never seen before. That time could be better spent driving new initiatives that bring value to the company.
- Catastrophic Failure – it’s easy to say it won’t happen to you, but these things do happen and when they do, are you equipped to solve it? If your database is corrupted or even completely deleted by a misguided query, will your team be able to restore it? Do you know the best practices around code rollbacks and database backups? Software companies like Fuse have rigorous and expensive processes in place to ensure their data, their customers’ data, and all of the software is secure and protected from disastrous scenarios.
Of course, there are some things you can build that are immensely helpful to your team. Internal dashboards and status trackers are examples of something that is low-stakes, with a small blast-radius if there is a failure.
In fact, with the Fuse Inventory MCP, we encourage our customers to build internal tools with their Fuse data. They can experiment with workflows and reporting knowing that their data is safe and clean in Fuse databases. We even have queries and skills that will help you automate and visualize your supply chain and financial data.
We’ve already had some power users create some amazing reports and artifacts using the Fuse Inventory MCP. Whether it is evaluating your true lead time, or discovering which transfers haven’t yet been received in Amazon FBA warehouse, so much power can be unlocked with a true system of record like Fuse.
References: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/tech/ai-made-building-your-own-software-easier-than-ever-but-that-doesnt-mean-you-should-heres-what-it-could-cost-you