Recently a restaurant group checked out Schedulefly. On paper, they could not have been a better fit: 20 locations, nice casual, full service, generally young staff. But after some internal meetings, they told me: “We have a very talented IT department and we feel we can build something just like this in house.”

There are tons of articles published on the build vs buy debate. One thing that seems consistent in these is that the decision to build makes sense when the solution is related to a core business process and owning the solution will help differentiate the company from the competition. In this situation it may well be worth the investment in time and money to craft a custom solution to ensure that the competition can’t just go out and buy the same software. Buying, on the other hand, makes sense when the solution is related to a commodity business process. The time, money and IT resources that are freed from buying a simple easy to deploy and adopt solution can be spent on custom systems that actually give the business a competitive edge.

Of course, I’d suggest that Schedulefly – at about $1/day/location – makes more sense than the cost for their IT staff to build (and own) an application, update it, maintain it, train employees, train new hires, field questions, provide support – not to mention the opportunity costs of IT working on something else more important. We are very good at restaurant employee scheduling and communication and it is all we do. We keep things simple and easy which allows us to continue to be out in front of changes and developments to ensure we make our customers’ lives easier. Since Schedulefly customers are spreading the cost with tons of other customers, they only pay a small recurring amount to resolve a problem that would likely be a distraction and costly to solve themselves.

Keepin’ It Simple & Fun,

Wil @ Schedulefly