Custom-coded voice picking solutions are the curse of the warehouse. They sound great during the sales cycle. (“No other company has a unique operation like yours, and a one-size-fits-all product just won’t do, so we’ll build something to your exact specifications.”) But the entire exercise is geared toward building a solution that is fixed and frozen upon delivery. What you gain in customization, you lose many times over when changes are needed – because your voice vendor is now the only game in town.
At Voxware, we’ve been called in to companies who found that the cost of making a change to an existing voice solution was greater than the cost of original deployment. That recipe might be great for the vendor, but it erases voice ROI and stymies the change needed to take the operation to a new level.
Configurable software products give enterprises the best of both worlds. They can be tailored to a given company’s requirements, but because they are software products and not custom-coded solutions, they continue to evolve and many companies can share in the new enhancements that are periodically made available. Through configurability, changes that are otherwise expensive and time-consuming can be implemented quickly and inexpensively.
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