Custom software in Vigo

The Vigo area concentrates a huge share of Galician industry: automotive around the Stellantis plant in Balaídos and its suppliers, seafood processing and canneries, shipyards, the granite of O Porriño and a logistics network revolving around the port and the Zona Franca industrial estates. These are companies with very specific processes and, often, with systems that don't talk to each other.

The pattern repeats: an off-the-shelf ERP that covers accounting and invoicing and, around it, a sea of Excel sheets, paper work orders and emails for everything else — shifts, time clocking, incidents, traceability, orders from professional customers. Custom software doesn't necessarily replace that ERP; many times it surrounds it and feeds it.

We also work with service companies — training, boating, clubs — that have grown to the point where administration eats up the day. Autoescuela GTI is a good example: it needed its own ERP because no generic program understood how its practical lessons, exams and fleet are organised.

The honest question isn't which is better, but which part of your business is different. For accounting, payroll or invoicing there are excellent standard programs and it would be absurd to reinvent them. Custom software pays off in the part that sets you apart or that no product solves well: the way you plan, produce, serve or measure.

That is why many custom solutions live alongside an off-the-shelf ERP: they fill the gap and integrate with it, instead of replacing everything at once. It is cheaper, quicker to get running and less risky.

A custom ERP, or bespoke management program, is the system a company runs its day-to-day on, written around how it works, instead of a standard tool it has to adapt to. We develop it in Vigo, with the same team that later maintains it, and we plan it in modules so the first one goes into use as soon as possible.

Our reference case is Autoescuela GTI. Its front office needed to manage enrolments and administration; the teaching staff, to record practical lessons and exam results from the system itself; and the driving school, to run the complete management of its fleet of practice cars. We solved it with an ERP for the office connected to a mobile app where students check their upcoming lessons, past classes and exams.

The result: the driving school's management was digitised from end to end and the procedures that students and teachers resolve without going through the front office multiplied by 10.

A CRM is where a company keeps track of who it sells to, what has been discussed with each customer and where each opportunity stands. Off-the-shelf CRMs cover the usual needs well —contacts, a sales funnel, reminders— and for many companies they are the right choice: you sign up and start using them without building anything.

A custom CRM pays off when your way of selling doesn't fit the standard funnel, or when the data that matters originates elsewhere —your website, your forms, your ERP, your campaigns— and someone has to copy it over by hand. Then the CRM is built around your process and connected to what you already use. If that isn't your case, we will say so: you don't need a CRM of your own to store contacts.

We build custom CRMs for clients and for ourselves. For Fase Service Partner, a marine and industrial electrical installations company in Vigo and Marín, we developed its CRM as well as its corporate website. And the one we can show you best from the inside is our own: ActionERP and its leads panel. Leads from the website forms and from Meta Ads forms go into a single funnel, with an instant alert to the team, follow-up until the lead is won or lost and export of conversions to Google Ads, so the campaigns know which leads end up as customers.

Our own management program is custom too. ActionERP is the system Action Development uses to run the whole company: customers and sales funnel, proposals, projects, tasks and hours spent, team clocking and absences, invoicing, expenses and reports, support tickets, hour banks, documents with electronic signature and a portal where each client can check their own information.

We built it with the same method we propose to our clients: in modules, starting with whatever took up most of our time, and with legal compliance built in from the start. The working-day record cannot be modified after the fact and invoicing is ready for Verifactu. That is why, when you ask us for a management program, we're not talking theory: we use it every day.

We develop chatbots and artificial intelligence assistants for companies, on WhatsApp, on the website or inside an app. For example, an assistant that serves customers out of hours and takes their request, another that reports the status of an order or a repair by querying your management software, or an internal one that answers the team with the company's procedures and documentation.

The difference from a template chatbot lies in what is behind it: the assistant queries and records data in your systems, such as your ERP, your CRM or your calendar, instead of repeating fixed answers. And when it doesn't know something, it hands the conversation to a person with all the context.

Before launching it, we set down in writing what it can and can't answer, with what information and which personal data it handles, and we test it with real questions. The AI takes care of the repetitive; decisions remain your team's.

The classic risk of custom software is the endless project: the scope grows, dates slip and nobody knows what is left. We avoid it by dividing the system into modules that go into use separately. The first solves the problem that hurts most and gets used for real; the following ones are designed with what we have learned.

We also work with the real users, not just with management. The person who clocks in, fills in the work order or serves at the counter is the one who decides whether a tool is adopted or abandoned, so they test the system from the first deliveries.

And we set down in writing the data model, the integrations and the important technical decisions, so the system doesn't depend on anyone's memory.