Configure, don’t code: How companies escape customization limbo for adaptable, scalable supply chains

Dec 2, 2024 • 6 min

Supply chains are constantly anticipating the next market jump scare, and businesses know they need adaptable planning solutions to survive inevitable disruption. Solution implementations and upgrades, however, pose major challenges of their own. Endless go-lives, coupled with complex, expensive, and time-consuming customization projects, put additional strain on planners, tax already-stretched IT resources, and make it difficult to adapt solutions to fluctuating business needs.

So what do companies need to ward off these looming threats to supply chain success?

The answer is a “configure, don’t code” approach. This kind of strategy is a two-parter. First, you need to be able to configure your solution quickly and in-house to ensure adaptability. Second, you need to know what to configure, employing an efficiency-driving strategy and AI capabilities that put that adaptability to good use. With this approach, companies can quickly test, validate, repeat, and continuously improve planning processes to achieve lasting payoff.

Adaptability rests on the ability to configure

Once upon a time, solution designs had to be set in stone from Day One. Customization required external support, lengthy timelines, and plenty of costly coding. This often delayed go-lives and postponed upgrades.

Luckily, times have changed, and simpler, more flexible configuration is now a reality. A configurable solution is one that allows teams to make quick, targeted changes to the automated business rules that govern calculations affecting forecasts, order proposals, and other planning decisions.

Configurability needs to be built into the planning solution itself. This requires a business rules engine (BRE), an interface that allows users to control business logic without complex programming. With a BRE, users can automate processes and manage decisions by setting or selecting pre-defined rules that complement a solution’s embedded AI toolkit.

The BRE is maintained by “super users,” who focus their attention on refining the company’s business logic to unlock process improvements. The ease of configurability means that super users can be – and often are – businesspeople on the planning teams. This keeps configuration closely aligned with daily planning tasks and lightens the workload for IT departments.

A BRE allows you to reap immediate benefits by going live with best practice configurations. Once live, you can review performance and adjust rules to refine outcomes over time. For instance, perhaps a super user has noticed that planners repeatedly make the same adjustment to fix a forecast issue for a particular DC. The super user can automate that fix quickly, freeing planners to focus on exceptions that are actually exceptions and not just unaddressed patterns.

In the long term, a BRE gives you the biggest bang for your buck because as the market changes or as your business grows, you have a pliable planning system that can bend to and support new business needs without breaking.

Efficiency stems from knowing what to configure

While there are significant benefits to configurability, poor configurations can cause major inefficiencies that injure profit margins. You don’t want to configure rules based on a hunch, or automate a bad process, or improve one result only to unintentionally devastate another. So where do you start? How do you decide what to configure?

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. To begin, a technology partner should already provide industry-proven best practices and automation guidelines to give go-lives a jump start. Those rules can be amended with guidance from solution experts and from platform-native AI.

For instance, AI-powered diagnostics allow the system to perform self-evaluations, identifying gaps in supply chain performance and directing user attention to opportunities for configuration improvement. These diagnostic tools generate reports that break down a company’s most important KPIs, such as availability, spoilage, or stock holding. By analyzing these KPIs and their root causes, the system helps planners eliminate time-consuming tasks through automation while elevating them to more strategic work.

There are also developments that would allow users to interact with supply chain gen AI agents. These agents would continuously monitor and adapt business rules in real time based on changing conditions and new data via a three-step process.

Agents present diagnostic results in easy-to-understand language so users can better pinpoint necessary plan adjustments or improvements.
Agents proactively recommend changes to planners for faster response times.
If granted permission, agents can autonomously adapt rules to eliminate the delay between a disruption and the appropriate course correction.

Coupled with built-in configurability, this burgeoning field of gen AI will significantly contribute to the speed and ease of supply chain adaptability.

How configuration improves supply chain performance

Configurability is a must in an arena of relentless competition. The adaptability and efficiency it provides deliver even more value than may be evident at first glance.

Increased speed and responsiveness

With best practices fueling faster implementations, companies can break the cycle of endless go-lives, pushing solutions to production sooner for faster ROI. Once live, companies can continue to develop streamlined, market-responsive processes, matching inventory to demand for limited waste and wider margins.

A business rules engine also transfers control to where it will be best used, allowing business users to make the changes they need quickly without dragging IT into protracted stages of consulting and programming.

Company-centric solutions and protected differentiation

While they may share industry similarities, no two businesses are exactly alike. Sometimes, there are network or process oddities that work for a particular company niche regional regulations that can change over time. A business rules engine makes it easy to tailor a planning solution to atypical characteristics that don’t impede efficiency.

Instead of trying to fit the process to an arbitrary standard, companies can just configure the rule to work within the existing set-up and press play. Configuration also helps companies test and establish non-standard processes that protect or enhance their market differentiators.

Improved supply chain control

Configurability is an important tool, and in time, it allows companies to take full ownership of their planning processes. By configuring in-house, companies can avoid the cost, time, and complexity of customization projects and maintain better control over their supply chains.

However, successful configurability is still a team effort. Collaboration with the solution provider minimizes the risks of configuration. For instance, sometimes, the limitations of a previous planning system carry over into a new solution, even though the limitations no longer exist. By working with solution experts, business leaders can push for improvements, ensuring practices are implemented because they maximize value, not just because they existed first.

Scalability

Companies acquire, merge, and change all the time. Massive changes can be painful with a rigidly customized setup. Suppose you’re expanding your network and need to adjust planning to incorporate twenty new stores or distribution centers. This could easily become a six-month project. With a BRE, however, this network expansion could be simulated and configured much more quickly, allowing you to scale your processes to match your growing business needs.

The human impact

All of these benefits converge on a single point – the boots on the ground. The object of configurability is to empower the human decision-makers who handle daily planning tasks. Freed from planning drudgery and armed with AI-driven insights, planners are positioned to become strategic storytellers, identifying what is happening in their supply chains and elucidating why those events are occurring so they can determine trends, highlight successes, and recommend improvements.

One such example is Oda, the largest online grocery retailer and fastest-growing company in the sector in Norway. Oda wanted to develop a more efficient and sustainable supply chain but struggled with manual processes that perpetuated a cycle of stockouts and spoilage. Implementing a business rules engine gave the company the automation tools they needed to achieve the accuracy, efficiency, and flexibility required to succeed in such a fast-paced industry.

According to Simon Svensson, Logistics Developer at Oda, “This automation has boosted our efficiency and significantly reduced food waste through more accurate and systematic ordering. Also, the ability to configure [the solution] ourselves has been essential, enabling us to customize the system to our specific requirements without needing extensive coding knowledge.” The BRE’s adaptability helped planners keep up with market demands and save time so they could focus on analysis, exploring ways to improve buying efficiency and further reduce waste.

Implementing a “configure, don’t code” strategy

A configurable, adaptable supply chain solution is essential for survival in today’s volatile markets. When businesses embrace a “configure, don’t code” approach, they put the power of innovation directly in planners’ hands, enabling swift responses to change without expensive development cycles. The business rules engine makes this possible, supporting scalability, reducing IT dependency, and accelerating time-to-value for your planning initiatives.

Look under the hood of the RELEX business rules engine