How can we customize and adapt our business processes to respond to market changes and meet our strategic objectives?
This is a question all retailers ask themselves.
- You need to factor in new competitors in your pricing strategy ?
- Have you redefined your product segmentation and need to adjust your prices?
- VAre you facing events that are disrupting your supply chains?
You don’t have time to wait for the next update to your business tool before taking action—or you risk being overtaken by more agile competitors.
To respond to these changes, you need adaptable and customizable business, pricing, and supply chain solutions. You should be able to set up your processes right away on your own.
The answer lies in a “No Code, Your Mode” approach, powered by a business rules engine.
This native feature, at the heart of our two solutions—Forescast and Pricing Analytics—is designed to enable teams to configure and customize processes without writing new code.
Learn what the rule engine and its benefits for your business.
The rules engine: customize without coding
What is a rules engine?
In a software solution, a rules engine is a feature that allows users to automate processes by defining rules, without requiring technical skills.
At optimiX Solutions, the rules engine is the component that brings the “No code, Your mode” approach to life in our pricing and supply chain solutions.
The goal is threefold:
- Empower business teams to customize the solution and processes without additional IT development
- Always be in good working order from one version to another. When upgrading to a new version, the rule engine settings remain functional.
- Enable a pricing or supply professional to configure their business process intuitively within the solution
The rules engine enables you to address any business, pricing, or supply chain challenge without the need for new development.
It combines personalization with team empowerment. In fact, many customers express the need for a Empathetic software that “speaks” the same language as its business users.
With the rules engine, there’s no longer any need to translate the teams’ requirements into code. You don’t need your CIO or data experts to run your solution. The business users are in control.
Not only can they rely on the rule engine to configure the system without any specific technical skills. The user interface allows them to configure and monitor their decision criteria without outside assistance. But, in addition, the machine learning algorithms at the heart of the software “replace” specific expertise, for example in supply chain forecasting.
How the optimiX Rules Engine Works
The optimiX rule engine is based on three key components:
- Filters : They allow you to define the scope of your actions, whether by product, location, or any other relevant segmentation. For example, you can filter for major import suppliers or products that are highly price-sensitive.
- Actions (or processes): These are based on algorithms that may involve AI, without the user needing to understand the technical details.
- Constraints : These are used to set limits on the result of the processing, such as limiting a price change to a maximum of 10%.
This structure allows you to develop complex scenarios tailored to your needs and your business.
The Benefits of the “No Code, Your Mode” Approach
Customization Without IT Development
The rules engine perfectly embodies the “No Code, Your Mode” approach by making it easy to customize business solutions without additional code. In a climate where companies need to become more agile without having to make massive investments in hiring new in-house staff, This feature makes customization accessible to business users themselves.
In fact, the business rules engine removes the technical barrier often associated with the configuration of business software. Users—whether they are price setters or procurement specialists—can independently adjust rules and scenarios directly within the tool, without having to go through the IT department or data profiles.
This ease of use is based on an intuitive interface that provides preconfigured components (filters, actions, and constraints) to address any business challenge.
The rules engine is designed to adapt to the organizational and strategic specifics of businesses. Whether you’re defining pricing processes (for example, adjusting prices based on the sensitivity of a product category) or optimizing procurement (such as managing constraints related to local suppliers or major importers), you can configure filters, actions, and constraints to set up a theoretically unlimited number of scenarios tailored to your needs.
To support users as they develop their skills, the rules engine can be configured either directly by the teams or with the assistance of a project manager. If necessary, the project manager helps clients define the appropriate rules and structure their scenarios in line with their pricing or supply chain strategies.
Greater responsiveness to market changes
The second benefit of the rules engine lies in its flexibility that it offers retail teams to help them adapt to market dynamics. As crises have followed one after another—or even overlapped—in recent years, companies need to be able to quickly adjust their processes.
When it comes to pricing, in most of the industries we serve, our clients emphasize the need to adjust their prices much more frequently than in the past. When it comes to the supply chain, unforeseen events such as the Suez Canal blockage, the COVID-19 crisis, and shortages of certain products are forcing retailers to be highly agile in managing their supply and inventory.
However, this agility is unattainable if you have to wait several weeks for a new development before you can realign your business processes.
The strength of the rules engine lies precisely in the fact that it allows pricing and supply chain teams to adjust their processes in real time—without having to wait for software updates or intervention from the IT department—to respond to market fluctuations.. For example, a pricer can quickly adjust pricing rules to maintain margins in the event of a sudden increase in the prices of certain products.
The business rules engine offers an unlimited number of scenarios that can be easily configured without adding code. Users can even develop, test, and deploy new scenarios with just a few clicks to experiment with different approaches and implement them quickly.
Finally, the business rules engine provides complete transparency into the impact of each step in a scenario. This allows you to quickly assess the effectiveness of the new rules you’ve implemented and adjust your scenarios accordingly.
Consistency of configurations across different versions
The rules engine offers an advantage in terms of investment sustainability and stability across different versions of the software.
In fact, the rules and scenarios configured in the rules engine remain functional across software versions. The effort invested in creating complex scenarios and customized business rules is preserved over time.
Thanks to this stability, business teams do not have to routinely rely on their IT department or developers to maintain their configurations when the software is updated. Users do not need to reconfigure or adjust their settings during updates. They can continue using their existing workflows without interruption.
This stability allows teams to gradually expand their scenarios without worrying about losing their work.
Empowering Business Teams
The rules engine is designed to simplify users’ business processes pricing or supply chain. Regardless of the strategy defined in advance by the retailer, the rules engine makes it possible to configure the appropriate rules and implement them operationally without delay and without technical constraints.
As we have seen, this allows for greater agility in implementing strategies and greater responsiveness to market changes.
The rules engine also plays a key role in giving business teams autonomy: they are no longer dependent on the vendor or their IT department to configure new rules. The rules engine’s intuitive interface allows them to create and modify complex scenarios without requiring specific technical skills.
This allows users to create scenarios tailored to their needs, whether by product category, geographic region, or other relevant criteria. They can develop multiple scenarios tailored to their company’s environment and organizational structure. And they can do so while minimizing the risk of error, since the rules engine provides traceability for the scenarios. If desired, the user can evaluate a scenario, review the rules, or revert to a previous version.
Ultimately, the “No Code, Your Mode” approach enhances your agility and helps your teams take ownership of our software solutions. Your business users can fully fulfill their role in implementing your pricing and supply chain strategies without relying on technical expertise.
This approach, which promotes adaptability, is also firmly focused on ROI. It makes it possible to immediately implement new strategic directions and execute several distinct scenarios based on various segmentation criteria (such as product types, customer segments, store types, etc.).
This gives you not only greater flexibility but also more granular control over your internal processes, without having to constantly allocate new development budgets.
You, too, can optimize your pricing and supply chain operations with our rules engine.
