New Age Supply Chain Business Capability – Prebuilt versus Composed

by Shan Muthuvelu, CEO UCBOS

Notably, enterprises are reinventing themselves by incorporating new product lines and services to be categorized as an essential business. Large enterprises are acquiring or merging with other businesses. A recent Deloitte survey shows that 61% of manufacturing Mergers & Acquisitions are classified as offensives aimed at capturing unassailable sectors and market leadership.  Businesses that want to explore these creative ideas must be equipped with solid technology solutions, as they are critical to making these radical moves successful.

This new-age thinking not only needs a strategy mindset but demands a robust digital ecosystem that accommodates adjustments across the enterprise and alterations in enterprise-level capabilities. The needs are unique to every business and hence cannot be prebuilt or prepurchased. 

Above all, firms need seamless visibility across the enterprise and cross-functional team collaboration to roll out newer business capabilities rapidly.  A flexible, robust digital ecosystem allows this functionality.

Currently, analysts report that many enterprises are faced with 3 top IT challenges:

• Failed, fragmented, siloed, and immature implementations stemming from the line of business(LoB) applications
• Inability to use best-of-the-breed features, as enterprises are locked into single-vendor systems
• Extensive requirements with a short delivery window

If you are facing these issues, then application composition technology is the best forward-thinking approach, as a prepackaged solution further intensifies the problem.

Enterprises require technology that enables them to iteratively and incrementally “compose” business applications that meet their business needs by assembling preexisting business-oriented components.  

UCBOS platform is designed deliberately to compose adhoc business capability for business agility with speed to market in mind. It connects siloed applications and enhances preexisting components with custom business features through a no-code approach that allows delivery in a fraction of the time.

In today’s situation, businesses are forced to reinvent themselves by rapidly rolling out curbside pickup, buy-online-pickup-in-store, and contactless delivery and returns to meet customer expectations.

Lets take the simple supply chain use case of tracking supplier performance related to contactless pickup or return in which disparate LoB applications are in play and multi-experience deployments are essential.

This requires a central system capable of building an iterative solution by absorbing inputs from preexisting LoB apps. It involves:

• Integrating the disparate systems
• Learning and connecting relevant data(metadata) across the chain
• Building the business logic that is unique to each supplier or division,  business unit, etc.
• A presentation layer offering an authentic digital experience at all touchpoints, including machines and devices
• Choreography and initialization of subsequent supply chain events by the scorecard index, including exception cases

Recent Gartner research backs this up, suggesting a capability framework for application composition technology. 

• MX capability is crucial for digital experience with web, mobile, social, process, bots, and machines
• Business Capability Development enhances vendor and custom code
• Business Capability Integration connects vendor packages, custom packages, social, web, mobile, and things.
• Business Process Orchestration empowers automation for recurring tasks.

Business wire reports that 48% of businesses worldwide will increase RPA adoption,  and companies that already use RPA have started adopting Artificial Intelligence.

• Last but not least, the framework should include components like Data, Metadata, API, Events, and AI

In prepackaged solutions, we need a mesh of vendors to congregate the same set of capabilities with space for incompatibility and adaptation, which ultimately adds to TCO. It leads us to the same space again that we started with.

Application Composition technology like UCBOS helps you attain effective results for unique issues without ripping out and rebuilding ecosystems. Enabling Automation and AI is relatively simple in a composable environment, as the time spent on development is zero. It aids businesses in meeting today’s challenges and to rapidly develop whatever capabilities are required in the future as they arise.