Great advice, perhaps I can share some personal experience.
I had a similar experience working with a large agricultural company, where we developed a track-and-trace system to manage their entire workflow. This system provided them with insights into all aspects of their processes. They gained full insight into their margins, mass-balance and quality control, from field to fork.
Our agreement included the agreement that we would own the system, with the option to eventually resell the system in the market, ensuring we could establish a company to support the system after development was completed. As you don't want to loose the knowledge after the system is finished and don't want to have a complete team of developers on your payroll.
We only developed the components that were crucial to the business process, relying on existing software packages, such as the accounting system, and ensured seamless integration between them.
One approach that worked really well for us was working on-site and providing support to the people using the system. This was invaluable in resolving issues that users were experiencing, and it also kept us focused on delivering quality—otherwise, we would be the ones responsible for providing support.
Please note that if you begin development, don’t expect the first version to be the final one. This was a major pitfall for us. The first version was good but not future-proof. Only after developing the second version, essentially a complete redesign and redeveloped from scratch, did we achieve the best solution for the business.
Ensure you maintain an open dialogue with the development team and allow for quick iterations. For us, a significant challenge was aligning expectations. Budgets were tight, and expectations were high, which created a high-pressure environment, that worked great for us and helped us focus. However sometimes this led to a lack of appreciation for our work, as expectations where not met. Keep in mind that developers think differently from business owners. We addressed this by having a technically proficient, data-savvy production manager in the company who understood most of our challenges and helped realign expectations.
Unfortunately for us, the company we built this system with didn’t respect our contract, preventing us from distributing the system and killing future opportunities. This resulted in legal action, which didn’t end well for us, as the company was much larger. We were naive in thinking we could make it work, assuming it would be in the best interest of both parties, but they didn't share the same intention.
Interesting article, however not as unique as the author presumes. We have an even larger naviduct [1], that also acts as a lock between two large lakes in the Netherlands.
Since I started working as a freelancer, I'm using PaymoApp [1], it's great for managing projects and tracking time for these projects. You can easily invoice these hours to your clients, with based on the projects you have defined. The best part for me is the ability to easily track time for my projects, as I'm working on different projects.
For accounting, PaymoApp doesn't offer full accounting services. I just started using Snelstart [2] a by and for Dutch market developed accounting platform. The best part of this application, is the integration with my accountant, he can monitor my administration 24/7 and this saves me time and money.
Depending on your usecase, a quick setup would be to use https://auth0.com/ They have a lot of documentation and samples to get started.
We have implemented it for authentication with a Asp.Net Core webservice, with a REST based API. Authorization is also possible, either by working with the JWT token scopes, or using the Auth0 app_metadata.
I had a similar experience working with a large agricultural company, where we developed a track-and-trace system to manage their entire workflow. This system provided them with insights into all aspects of their processes. They gained full insight into their margins, mass-balance and quality control, from field to fork.
Our agreement included the agreement that we would own the system, with the option to eventually resell the system in the market, ensuring we could establish a company to support the system after development was completed. As you don't want to loose the knowledge after the system is finished and don't want to have a complete team of developers on your payroll.
We only developed the components that were crucial to the business process, relying on existing software packages, such as the accounting system, and ensured seamless integration between them.
One approach that worked really well for us was working on-site and providing support to the people using the system. This was invaluable in resolving issues that users were experiencing, and it also kept us focused on delivering quality—otherwise, we would be the ones responsible for providing support.
Please note that if you begin development, don’t expect the first version to be the final one. This was a major pitfall for us. The first version was good but not future-proof. Only after developing the second version, essentially a complete redesign and redeveloped from scratch, did we achieve the best solution for the business.
Ensure you maintain an open dialogue with the development team and allow for quick iterations. For us, a significant challenge was aligning expectations. Budgets were tight, and expectations were high, which created a high-pressure environment, that worked great for us and helped us focus. However sometimes this led to a lack of appreciation for our work, as expectations where not met. Keep in mind that developers think differently from business owners. We addressed this by having a technically proficient, data-savvy production manager in the company who understood most of our challenges and helped realign expectations.
Unfortunately for us, the company we built this system with didn’t respect our contract, preventing us from distributing the system and killing future opportunities. This resulted in legal action, which didn’t end well for us, as the company was much larger. We were naive in thinking we could make it work, assuming it would be in the best interest of both parties, but they didn't share the same intention.