There is no shortage of large-scale system solutions for a wide variety of purposes. For most common business needs, building one yourself is a case of reinventing the wheel. Someone else has already solved the problem for you and is selling it at a price that easily beats the development and maintenance costs of a custom built one. However, there are situations where the obvious answer isn't the right one.
In this article, we make the case for the idea that the build-or-buy question deserves more careful thought than it usually receives. Sometimes, a sovereign system might be a key component in getting ahead of the competition.
When evaluating the need for a custom-built system, the first question is straightforward: does a solution already exist that genuinely fits your needs? For many business processes – payroll, basic HR, accounting – the answer is almost certainly yes. If a well-supported off-the-shelf tool covers 95% of your requirements, the way forward is clear.
That being said, in daily business the difference between passable and tailor-made can become quite significant over time. The more specific or innovative your requirements, the narrower the market gets – and at some point, the gap between what's available and what you actually need becomes too wide to bandage with workarounds and customisation.
Speaking of customisation: there's a pattern worth watching out for. It goes roughly like this: a third-party solution looks like a good fit, so you buy it. Then you add a custom integration. Then another. Then a workaround for the thing it doesn't quite do. Before long, you're maintaining a fragile stack of modifications on top of a system that was never designed for your use case – and every vendor update becomes a potential new issue to solve.
Ready-made solutions are generally built with flexibility in mind, but there's a ceiling to how far that flexibility can take you. The further you push past it, the more you're dealing with a house of cards. If a system works for your needs out of the box, it's usually a good sign. And if it requires a lot of tinkering from the get-go, it might be a sign that that's what you'll need to spend your time doing down the road as well.
This is one of the more underappreciated dimensions of the decision. Every off-the-shelf solution is built with assumptions about how business on average operate. Which means that when you adopt it, you're often implicitly agreeing to adjust your processes to fit the tool, not the other way around.
For many companies, that's a reasonable trade-off. But when operational efficiency is a serious competitive advantage, the answer might be different. Hesburger's ERP that we built from ground up is a good example of this. The system is shaped around how their multinational fast-food operations actually work. This matters because every second saved in faster processes accumulates quickly. This is simply not something a generic solution could have been optimised for.
Which brings us to the question that we think should frame the entire discussion: is this system part of what makes your company distinctively good at what it does?
If the answer is no (meaning it's infrastructure rather than differentiation) and a third-party option exists, buying is almost always the right call. But if the system is central to how you serve customers, how you operate, or how you plan to grow, building a custom solution gives you a tool that's built around your specific use case, and that can be scaled further as the business and the world around it evolves.
This is also relevant when the system is customer-facing. The more visible a solution is to your end users, the more control over experience and presentation matters – something that is harder to achieve with an off-the-shelf product.
Custom development has a higher upfront cost – but it's only a part of the calculation.
Off-the-shelf solutions come with ongoing licence fees that can change whenever the vendor decides. They also come with the risk that the vendor's priorities shift – towards a different market segment, a different product direction – leaving you with worse support and features that increasingly don't match what you need.
The more useful frame is total cost of ownership over time, weighed against the efficiency gains a custom solution can deliver. Something that looks expensive at first might prove a fantastic investment when measured against years of operational improvement. And something that looks affordable can become costly when you factor in the business value lost to processes that don't work quite as smoothly as they could.
Owning your own system means owning your data on your own terms. You decide where it lives, how it's structured, and what you can do with it.
As more companies look to build AI-powered tools on top of their operational data, this is becoming an increasingly significant factor. A third-party system may give you access to your data in principle, but whether you can actually process it the way you need to is a different question worth looking into.
Buy, when the market has a solution that genuinely fits your needs, when the system isn't core to your competitive edge, and when the economics work in your favour over the long term.
Build, when your requirements are specific enough that no existing solution fits without significant compromise, when the system is central to how you operate or compete, or when you need full control over data, integrations, and future development.
Most importantly: don't jump to conclusions too hastily. The companies that get the most out of their systems – whether bought or built – are the ones that asked the right questions before taking the leap.
Is a this a topical issue in your company? Get in touch — we'd be happy to help you find the solution that best fits your business.
