Why your business needs a packaged business capability now

Highlights

You’ll learn about the benefits of PBCs:

• Simplifies business operations: Create pre-configured, plug-and-play solutions through standardized integration and APIs
• Enhances efficiency: PBCs streamline your workflows across departments, helping you automate your repetitive tasks
• Promotes innovation: With PBCs, you test new ideas without disrupting your core systems
• Scales with your business: PBCs manage varying loads on your website, allowing you to scale your operations 
• Improves user experience: PBCs ensure consistent interactions across platforms, increasing your user experience

Start using PBCs today!

Keep reading to learn more!

What happens when your e-commerce store witnesses an unprecedented traffic surge because of a new product you added? If your website cannot handle the influx of traffic, you will face downtime, reducing customer experience while frustrating them. Scalability and agility aren’t just nice to have—they're essential.

Companies must adapt, pick up on trends, test different innovations and bring them to market. And, you can do it using packaged business capabilities (PBCs). 

Gartner Research recognizes PBCs as crucial and every business leader must give importance to PBCs for success. 

But what is PBC, what are its benefits and role in composable commerce and how do you implement them?

What is a packaged business capability?

A packaged business capability is an integral part of composable commerce, helping you create best-of-breed solutions for your business. PBCs are a group of software components representing your data schema, a set of services and application programming interfaces (APIs). A PBC typically serves a specific, well-defined business capability.

In other words, PBCs are independent and autonomous business services that can be used in parts or as a whole. These modules are the building blocks for creating customized business user experiences and product suites.

For example, an e-commerce store integrates PBCs such as customer relationship management (CRM), inventory management and personalized marketing tools. Combining these PBCs offers business users a seamless shopping experience with tailored product recommendations, efficient stock availability updates and customer support—all accessible through a single user interface. 

It encourages companies to customize their technology setup by choosing software based on their business goals and requirements.

Microservices vs packaged business capability

Benefits of packaged business capabilities

Flexible

The PBCs can be as small or large as needed. You may group just two modules or 15 for more complicated operations. You build something you need and make changes along the way. In addition, you can customize everything as opposed to strict cookie-cutter templates. Ultimately, it depends on what makes the most sense for you and your team. 

Better user experience

With PBCs, you design an interface and align it with your audience's requirements. PBCs help you deliver seamless, intuitive interactions across various touchpoints. By standardizing functionalities across different modules, PBCs provide a consistent user experience, whether users browse your website on a mobile device, desktop, or other platform. 

Scalable

Business needs and customer habits evolve quickly and PBCs allow you to meet these dynamic demands. Each PBC module can handle varying loads without affecting the performance of other components. For example, an inventory management PBC can scale up during peak shopping season. 

Case study: How did Contentstack make LADbibe Group scalable?

LADbible Group switched from their in-house content system to Contentstack's flexible headless content management system (CMS) to meet their evolving content needs. The company emphasizes the importance of scalability. Contentstack’s extensibility allowed the team to easily integrate with existing infrastructure and experiment with new content types, including live articles developed during an internal hackathon. The developer tools streamlined feature requests and enabled quick changes, while the integrated UI improved efficiency for over 100 content writers. Overall, Contentstack has halved the editorial process time and strengthened collaboration with exceptional support from the Contentstack team.

After using Contentstack, Tom McGiveron, Lead Software Engineer at LADibible Group, said:

“Contentstack gives us a solid base that’s easily extensible. We’re now able to turn out new features quickly and implement them in an elegant way.”

Read the complete case study here.

Reduces business complexity

Packaged business capabilities make your life a lot easier by offering pre-configured, plug-and-play solutions that reduce your customization need, reducing complexity in your business operations. For instance, with standardized integration, built-in unified APIs and integration tools, PBCs connect different systems, ensuring smooth data flow and communication. Because of the modular nature of PBCs. you can update or change individual modules without affecting the entire system. 

Streamline business processes

Well-designed PBCs offer more efficient workflows across different departments, removing any instance of software function overlap. These pre-configured modules simplify complex workflows by automating repetitive tasks and integrating with existing systems. With PBC, you speed up critical processes, improve collaboration across departments and maintain high accuracy in your operations.

Higher return on investment

As PBCs ensure a higher return on investment (ROI) by:

• Optimizing your operations
• Improving the time to market
• Reducing the total cost of ownership of the software

Their modular nature allows for selective adoption, allowing you to invest and scale capabilities as needed, reducing overhead costs.

Ensures innovation

Complex and monolithic technology often slows down business innovations—experiments are impossible. As you develop PBCs, your business teams can test new ideas and develop new products without jeopardizing their basic IT infrastructure or system. 

The role of packaged business capability in composable commerce

Packaged business capabilities ensure a modular, flexible, composable business architecture to build powerful e-commerce stores. The role of PBC in composable enterprise is as follows:

Modularization

PBCs break down complex business functionalities into smaller modules. Each module represents an independent capability, customizing your customers' commerce experience. 

Reusability

PBCs are essential in composable commerce because they’re reusable. You can reuse them across multiple channels because they provide pre-built and standardized functionalities.

Flexibility

Using PBC, companies can mix and match different functionalities to create never-before-come commerce experiences. PBC's flexible nature allows for faster time to market and helps companies respond to market changes. 

Integration

PBCs offer standardized APIs, event channels and integration frameworks, making it easy to connect with existing systems. For instance, you can integrate a payment processing PBC with your e-commerce platform. Integration helps you add new features, increase overall business effectiveness and reduce your time to market.

Scalability and performance 

PBCs are built to scale, ensuring they perform irrespective of the situation. For example, a customer support PBC can ramp up during peak shopping seasons to handle the extra traffic. The scalable nature means each part manages increased demand without impacting others, providing a smooth and efficient user experience. 

How to implement packaged business capabilities

Identify business needs

Look at your current business processes and determine where PBCs make a real difference. For instance, you might need a PBC offering data analytics capabilities if you're struggling with data management.

Evaluate different PBC solutions

Choose a PBC compatible with your existing system, scalable nature, cost and functionality. For example, if you’re a small business, you might prioritize cost-effective, scalable options.

Plan the integration

Put together a plan detailing how you will integrate PBCs into your IT setup. Map out every step, set clear timelines and establish milestones to monitor your progress. 

Test the PBC

Test the PBC to see how well it works with your existing equipment. Simulate a busy sales day to check whether the PBC is reliable and functioning properly. 

Train your team

Ensure your team knows the new PBC system's ins and outs. Offer comprehensive training sessions and ensure they have ongoing support for troubleshooting and optimization.

Monitor and optimize

Post-implementation, monitor your PBC to track its performance. Gather feedback from users and make changes to increase its effectiveness. 

Example of packaged business capabilities

PBCs provide you with valuable information about various industries. Here are some examples of packaged business capability:

Customer relationship management (CRM)

Automate customer interactions using CRM systems. These systems record your customers' preferences, information and purchases. A CRM manages your sales processes and marketing campaigns, improving customer engagement. 

Supply chain management (SCM)

A supply chain management (SCM) PBC offers the following benefits:

• Tracks and manages your inventory
• Fulfills orders
• Forecasts demands
• Provides logistic coordination
• Deliver customers’ orders on time

It also ensures you don’t run out of inventory during peak season. 

Enterprise resource planning (ERP)

An ERP system is software that integrates various business functions, such as supply chain management, human resources, manufacturing and finance, in a single system. Every industry can integrate an ERP, as there’s no need for every team member or team to use separate apps on their apps and websites. Teams can access everything from a single interface. 

Human capital management (HCM)

HCM manages your human resources, which involves people working for your company, recruitment, employee training and staff motivation. Using this PBC helps you with:

• Talent management
• Payroll
• Workforce planning
• Improving employee relations
• Efficient use of the workforce]

Business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools

BI can perform business analytics. These business intelligence and analytics tools help you with:

• Data analysis
• Predictive analytics
• Data aggregation
• Reporting

These solutions help you make the right decisions because they turn large amounts of data into useful insights.

FAQs

What is a packaged business capability?

A packaged business capability (PBC) is a pre-packaged software module offering specific business functions. It allows easy integration into your existing systems.

What is the difference between microservices and packaged business capabilities?

Microservice architecture focuses on specific tasks within an application, while PBCs are broader functional modules that consist of multiple microservices and deliver the desired business functionalities.

What are examples of business capabilities?

Some core business capabilities are PIM, CRM, SCM, ERP and HCM.

Learn more

If your business is scaling to meet consumers’ needs, pay attention to the tools and technologies used on your website. PBCs bring architecture to your website without compromising its characteristics or neglecting your customers' needs.

To learn how packaged business capabilities can change your business processes, talk to us.