When organisations plan a major digital transformation, the same question always finds its way onto the table. Do we take the platform as it was designed and align our processes to industry standards, or do we customise the system so it mirrors how we work today?
Ultimately, this decision ultimately determines how far an organisation is willing to go in aligning process optimisation with digital transformation.
However, it sounds like a technical decision. In reality, it’s a strategic fork in the road that influences cost, timelines, maintainability and the long-term success of the entire programme.
At MOAT, we’ve supported transformation across pharma, clinical supply chain, financial services, manufacturing and advanced engineering for years. And to be honest, we’ve seen the pain that comes from picking the wrong side. Customise everything, and you inherit complexity you didn’t bargain for. Fit to standard, and you give the organisation a cleaner, faster and more scalable path forward.
Below is our view on why fit to standard consistently wins, and why bespoke solutions so often create more problems than they solve.
You Pay for Customisation… and Forever
Bespoke features always start innocently. A small tweak. A replicated workflow. A screen that looks “more like the old system”. These conversations feel harmless, but each one becomes a line of custom code that needs to be designed, tested, secured and maintained for its entire lifecycle.
That’s where the real cost lies.
In addition, customisation introduces hidden spend in areas people rarely anticipate: regression testing, upgrade breakage, dependency conflicts, longer resolution times and the need for specialists who understand your specific flavour of the system.
Fit to standard, on the other hand, relies on vendor-supported functionality. It’s more cost-effective upfront and dramatically cheaper to maintain over time. You’re investing in the core engine, not rewriting it.
Time-to-Value Matters More Than Teams Admit
Every custom requirement stretches timelines. Analysis takes longer, design takes longer, testing takes longer and UAT becomes a much bigger exercise. By the time those custom elements are ready, the market, the business or the opportunity may have already moved.
As a result, standard solutions go live faster. The organisation gets capability in months rather than years, which means benefits land earlier. Efficiency, compliance, forecasting, planning, automation… all of it becomes real sooner.
Transformation is ultimately a race against diminishing relevance. Fit to standard helps you move at the pace required.
Technical Debt Accumulates Quietly in the Background
One of the toughest realities in digital transformation is that technical debt doesn’t appear overnight. It creeps in slowly. A bespoke workflow that no one wants to touch. A customised interface that breaks every time the platform updates. A data model that no longer aligns with anything else in the business.
Companies that fit to standard barely deal with these issues. Vendor updates drop in cleanly. New features can be adopted quickly. Systems stay healthy and aligned.
Meanwhile, organisations with heavy customisation spend too much time firefighting. Not innovating. Not improving. Just keeping the lights on.
Scalability Comes From Standards, Not Personal Preference
Most organisations want to grow, diversify or enter new markets. The systems under them need to be elastic enough to handle that without major surgery.
Consequently, fit to standard gives you that elasticity. Vendors build their platforms using global best practice and future-proof patterns informed by thousands of implementations.
Bespoke solutions don’t scale as well. They were designed for “how we worked at the time” rather than “how we might need to work in five years”. Expansion, regulation and market shifts expose the fragility of customised environments very quickly.
Risk Reduces When You Avoid Reinventing the Wheel
Furthermore, customisation multiplies risk. You create single points of failure. You become dependent on niche developers. You increase the chances of introducing vulnerabilities. You complicate the upgrade path. You hard-code logic that might not meet future compliance standards.
In practice, fit to standard reduces that risk simply by sticking with what has been tested, audited and stabilised across entire industries. When your processes align with vendor-supported features, you avoid a long list of avoidable headaches.
Standardisation Enables Better Ways of Working
This is the piece people often underestimate. When teams try to customise systems to reflect “how we’ve always done it”, they drag legacy habits into the future. Sometimes those habits were designed around old constraints, outdated tools or organisational silos that no longer make sense.
Fit to standard forces a healthier question:
Why do we do it this way at all?
That’s where genuine process improvement happens. Teams challenge assumptions. They drop low-value steps. They shift to industry best practice. They modernise, rather than digitise inefficiency.
This is often where the biggest transformation benefits sit.
Industry Best Practice Is Built Into Standard Solutions
Standard configurations aren’t basic or generic. They’re the distilled result of global regulatory requirements, operational insight, compliance expectations and lessons from thousands of real implementations.
When you fit to standard, you inherit that maturity.
By contrast, customisation risks codifying outdated processes into your future ecosystem.
Integration Is Simpler When You Avoid Bespoke Code
Modern organisations rely on interconnected systems. Finance talks to supply chain. Supply chain talks to quality. Quality talks to manufacturing. Data needs to move cleanly between them.
For example, standard platforms integrate easily because the data models, APIs and connectors are predictable.
Custom-heavy systems require custom integration, which increases cost, breaks more often and becomes difficult to troubleshoot.
The cleaner the core, the cleaner everything around it becomes.
Resource Requirements Become Manageable
Fit to standard leans on roles that are easier to source: configuration specialists, analysts, project managers and process experts.
Bespoke environments lean on niche developers who understand your specific layers of code. When those people leave, retire or move roles, you’re exposed. This isn’t theoretical. We’ve seen organisations genuinely struggle to keep their systems running because one person knew “how the custom bit works”.
Where Customisation Does Make Sense
MOAT isn’t anti-customisation. We’re anti-unnecessary customisation.
There are situations where enhancements are valid:
• specialist regulatory obligations
• integrations with proprietary equipment
• genuinely differentiating intellectual property
• unique workflows that create competitive advantage
But those decisions should be deliberate, measured and tied to strategic value, not personal preference or legacy comfort.
The Simple Reality: Fit to Standard Delivers More Value, More Often
Digital transformation works when organisations resist the urge to rebuild the past. Standardised solutions give you speed, resilience, scalability and clarity. They help teams adopt better ways of working, not just digitise the old ones.
Customisation has its place, but when it becomes the default, it drains resources, slows delivery and locks you into complexity that becomes hard to escape.
The companies that get transformation right are the ones who draw a firm line early. Fit to standard wherever possible. Customise only where it genuinely matters.
Ready to adopt a fit-to-standard approach that reduces complexity and accelerates transformation? Speak to MOAT’s Digital Transformation & Process Optimisation experts today. Enquire today!