The Future of Composable Business Products Is Already Here

If there’s one thing this past year has taught us, it’s the value—make that the need for—adaptability. As global events have changed the way we’ve all done business, agility has never been more important, especially for enterprise business capabilities. Navigating these changes requires much more than an agile ERP strategy; it requires a fully composable ERP strategy.

In a recent whitepaper from Gartner, The Future of ERP is Composable (13 October 2020), available to subscribers of their reports, analysts Tim Faith, Denis Torii and Paul Schenck share that ERPs have fallen short on the ability to plan, design and execute with real-time responsiveness. Even before the pandemic, application leaders were struggling with ERP strategy, often tied to monolithic strategies with heavy customization and inadequate systems.

The future state of ERP, according to the paper, will be defined by integrated applications that can be composed and recomposed to deliver customer-defined business capabilities. “What must application leaders who manage ERP strategy do to deliver capabilities that enable the business to survive and thrive? They must prepare for the era of composable ERP.”

The key to a composable strategy, be it for commerce or ERP, is technical solutions with the agility to move quickly on opportunities as they come up. ERP projects are often measured in years and even small adjustments can take weeks with teams of consultants. What if you could unbundle the areas where the scope crept on your ERP projects only because it didn’t seem possible do it anywhere else?

Composable by nature, viax.io's Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC) bring together our API-driven services into ready-to-use modules solving specific business challenges. For example, our Configure-Price-Quote PBC is made up of our Configuration Engine, Order Management, Pricing and Workflow services.

One of the questions that comes up in the planning stages of every Enterprise B2B Commerce project is where should we calculate pricing? The inevitable answer was the ERP systems would deliver incredibly slow performance, but the commerce systems were not capable of handling the complexities inherent to B2B. This left clients feeling handcuffed to their ERPs for pricing, which were never built with the intention that they would have to be performant for customer-facing situations.

Our modular commerce building blocks and API-centric architecture is designed to solve these issues, giving clients the ability to take a composable approach when deciding how to handle customer-facing pieces like Pricing or Inventory. The viax Pricing module handles ERP-levels of sophistication for B2B prices while delivering it at speeds that deliver for modern commerce.

By selecting viax for your commerce solutions, you also allow your ERP system to focus on the core tasks it was designed for while giving you the ability to build a market-leading composable ERP strategy.

Of course, when your business is changing rapidly in real time, why would you wait for a future state? Take a look at my calendar to schedule a call to prepare for the future.