Modern Trends and Best Practices in Enterprise App Development

Modern business management requires a high level of workflow automation and an individual administrative approach. All these activities can be easily performed by customized enterprise applications. With their help companies can tune up their supply chains, improve customer service, enhance their employees’ management, process large amounts of data, and accomplish many other tasks.

A wide range of businesses has already built their own enterprise digital solutions based on the latest trends and modern practices. One of them is to create enterprise apps that run on mobile devices.

In this article, we’ll look into a variety of enterprise mobile apps, how they can benefit your business, and how long it takes to build one.

What Is Enterprise Mobile App Development?

The term “enterprise mobile app development” is quite self-explanatory. This activity implies the development of enterprise-level apps that run on mobile devices. So, what are “enterprise-level apps”?

Enterprise-level apps are the applications developed for the management and optimization of business processes in a company. They perform various tasks aimed at meeting functional business needs specific to a certain company. For example, they can:

• automate certain tasks in production processes;
• provide data access based on the roles of each employee in the company;
• improve communication and data exchange between employees and departments;
• provide data analysis and reporting on the results;
• perform customer and supplier relationship management processes, etc.

This way, with mobile enterprise apps your employees will be able to access the company’s data based on their roles in the app, control and manage the company’s workflows using portable devices.

Types of Enterprise Mobile Applications

There is a wide variety of enterprise mobile apps that can be adjusted to your company’s business needs. All of them can be divided into three main categories: employee, department, and company levels.

Employee-level enterprise mobile apps are task-focused apps created for solving issues related to a certain position in the company. This type of apps provides employees with the latest data, excluding the necessity to connect an operator or make official inquiries. Also, it sends a company’s feedback to its employees, using in-app notifications.

Some examples of employee level apps include:

• sales process management software where employees can quickly retrieve all the customer-related data;
• messaging tools for quick communication between a team lead and a team of developers on the project updates;
• business analytics apps that provide project managers with the project progress data and its key KPIs;
• supply-chain and logistics enterprise apps for orders and shipments tracking and products management, and others.

Department-level enterprise mobile apps improve the workflow of certain company’s departments. There is a wide range of department-level apps, that can include:

• project management tools for sending group messages and establishing team goals and objectives;
• ticket systems for tech support;
• marketing management apps for market analysis, launching marketing campaigns, resource management, and others;
• accounting apps for financial operations and transactions;
• HR management tools for employees’ data management and their feedback collection, and others.

Department-level applications can include partner applications that allow sharing data with partner organizations and industry specialized applications suitable for different business niches like e-commerce apps, banking and finance, IoT, and others.

Company-level enterprise mobile apps are aimed at establishing stable communication between departments – an integrated network where each employee can reach their executives or colleagues across the departments. These apps can include:

• apps for corporate training which provide learning opportunities inside a company;
• communication apps for an entire company;
• general productivity apps for monitoring and planning company-level activities.

Benefits of Enterprise Mobile Applications

When opting for customized enterprise mobile application development, companies can add in their apps the features essential for their successful business development. Here are some examples of how your business can benefit from enterprise mobile apps.

• Structured data

Even a small company has to handle large amounts of information from various sources like departments, clients, etc. Enterprise applications help businesses to quickly structure and process the data, effectively dividing it by departments and teams and making it simple to access for each employee.

• High security level 

Enterprise mobile apps provide all the company’s employees with simple role-based access. This ensures that each worker and manager gets access only to the data they are allowed to by settings. Therefore, it becomes harder for non-authorized users to retrieve sensible data from the company’s databases. Moreover, these apps can have special configurations for the company’s clients or business partners.

• Simple update on the latest changes

You can quickly update all the employees on the latest news or changes in the company rules as well as reach separate teams or employees. Besides that, these apps allow sharing documents, excluding the necessity to use third-party services and preventing any possible data leaks.

• Payments, accounting, and transactions

Some enterprise apps can include e-Commerce payment systems or other FinTech solutions for enhanced budget management in the company. For example, an enterprise app can notify your employees of the payment deadlines or provide an opportunity to perform any accounting tasks in the app.

• Employees management

With enterprise apps, managers can monitor their employees’ workload and progress, facilitate employees’ onboarding process, and perform other activities related to employees administration.

• Supply chain management

This solution is especially valuable for the manufacturers who have to order materials from other companies to produce their goods. With a supply chain management feature they can plan, deliver, and manage the number of materials and transportation. This will allow them to better control and monitor the materials supply, resulting in better budget allocation.

• Client support

Some enterprise apps can include 24/7 client support which can automatically process the basic client inquiries while your team takes over more complex tasks.

How Long Does It Take to Develop an Enterprise Mobile Application?

Enterprise mobile application development is usually a time-consuming process. Though there are a variety of factors that strongly influence the time frame. They include:

• the complexity of the project and the number of features you want to embed in your digital solution;
• productivity and functionality of the tech stack;
• experience and expertise of the mobile app developers;
• project deadlines and the planned budget.

When estimating your project time, you also need to consider 5 main stages for building an effective mobile app.

1. The planning stage is about evaluating the app idea, determining its purposes and audience. Also, it involves choosing the requested app’s platform, development tech stack, and selecting developers into the development team.
2. App design and prototyping involve building prototypes of the future app to test the idea. Building a prototype helps businesses to save time and budget. Enterprise mobile developers create a sample with the main functionality and check if this prototype is consistent with the business needs.
3. The development stage is the longest part when mobile developers do most of the work like building the app’s front-end and back-end layers, APIs, adjusting and connecting the app to various services, etc.
4. At the testing stage, the QA team ensures that the app works properly and doesn’t include any critical and major bugs as well as if it’s safe to store and share data in the app.
5. App release and maintenance involve launching the app and testing it with its audience. The project team gathers feedback from the users to understand what improvements they could make.

Our Expertise in Building Mobile Enterprise Apps

SCAND mobile development team has participated in several enterprise mobile development projects. Here is one of the cases our team recently worked on.

Our team had to develop a reliable and high-speed application for task management and time tracking. For this, the team performed an in-depth analysis of the app and understood which features they needed to include to bring maximum value to the customer’s business.

With the customers’ requirements in mind, the SCAND team has added to the app the following features:

• data processing and syncing on all the devices;
• data storage;
• reports generation in HTML and PDF formats;
• image editor;
• NFC tags for quick data sharing with nearby devices;
• Barcodes and QR codes reading;
• sending SMS;
• GPS support;
• customizable UI;
• adaptable business logic and customizable workflow.

With all these features, users could apply the app in more than one industry field like e-commerce, logistics, cleaning services, etc.

As a result, the SCAND team developed a highly customizable enterprise mobile application that meets all the customer’s requirements. Our customer was satisfied with the result as our team managed to develop a highly effective digital solution within the estimated time frame and the budget.

Conclusion on Enterprise Mobile App Development

Building an enterprise mobile application is a sure way to give a great boost to your business development. Such apps help companies to accurately process and analyze the data they daily receive from various channels, improve their customer service and supply chains, perform payments and accounting, and so much more.

We, at SCAND, will be happy to participate in the development of your app and bring your creative vision to life. Feel free to share your ideas and feedback with us.