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When we look at the success of Katapult Pro customers across the board, we typically observe the following items being directly correlated to company growth:
investment in training
alignment with industry trajectory
leveraging custom coding
While we don't want to overlook the importance of the first two items, the third is where we start to see a stark difference in Katapult Pro teams—that is, between those who leverage the system "out-of-the-box" and those who invest time and dollars back into the platform to create custom, automated reports, or to expedite the development of new features that push the platform and industry forward.
Katapult Pro has a ton of configurability from the client side, between the Model Editor, Map Styles Editor, and Photo Forms and Map Prints that can be branded and tailored to match users' needs.
Additionally, standard GIS and spreadsheet exports provide a lot of flexibility for project managers to pivot table and slice their way to custom charts and graphs. With a little clever manipulation, users can pull out meaningful KPI data from out-of-the-box exports and Admin Reports.
But, as all of you know, most projects and clients require special attention, which is why we offer custom coding support to all our clients. Before we dive into the two main types of services, I want to address the major question that all coding projects need to answer: is it worth it?
The costs to undergo a custom coding project are substantial, as they require time, energy, and very real dollars going out the door. The million-dollar question is whether or not the investment will yield to improved efficiency, higher levels of accuracy (reduces clean-up costs), or allows your team to make higher margins. The way that I always ask the question revolves around volume: will you run this new feature or deliverable 10 times? 100 times? 1000+ times? The ROI calculation is super simple once you have that figure—there's no reason to invest time or money in a new software solution unless it makes you money.
And there's no shortage of money to be made—on a 10,000 pole project that you're bidding at $25/pole, any customization that saves you a small amount of time or energy per pole is worth an initial investment. Sma on a job with only 100 pole, where any per pole savings would need to be major in order to justify a custom coding solution.
And speaking of solutions, custom coding for our clients typically falls under one of two categories:
Custom Deliverables
This type of project typically includes mapping photo links, measurements, distances, and attribute data to a spreadsheet or pole profile that pole owners or other clients require for the pole attachments process. We can automate the population of fields that are normally entered by hand or copied and pasted from a separate sheet, and spit it out in CSV, PDF, DOCX, and other formats. Other types of deliverables include custom maps or dashboards to track projects and key results.
Expedited Features
Our platform's software roadmap is based on a combination of our internal projects' needs and our vision for the industry, and might not always align with your team's needs. To expedite our roadmap and bring new features to the platform sooner, we offer teams the ability to utilize custom code hours. Your team will have a leg up both because you will be the first to test and use the new features, and you'll also have input on the way we implement new features into the platform!
Thanks for reading! You can submit a custom coding request here. Feel free to reach out to support@katapultengineering.com at any time to learn more about the Katapult Pro platform and custom coding!