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Summary – Facing volatile markets and growing technical debt, monolithic systems can’t keep up with business demands. By isolating critical functions as Packaged Business Capabilities, externalizing business rules in a dedicated engine, driving workflows through configuration, and adopting open-source, API-first middleware, you speed up deployment cycles, simplify testing, optimize resource allocation, and eliminate vendor lock-in.
Solution: migrate to a strategy-aligned composable architecture to deliver changes in hours, reduce costs and risks, and ensure agility at scale.
Monolithic architectures, long synonymous with stability, are now a major barrier to agility. In the face of shifting markets, growing regulations, and exponential data volumes, every improvement demands weeks of development, extensive testing cycles, and increases technical debt.
To remain competitive, a company must be able to reconfigure its processes, adapt its business rules, and integrate new services in hours rather than weeks. That’s the heart of transitioning to a composable, modular, configuration-driven system—one that keeps pace with the business, not the other way around.
Isolate Critical Functions with Packaged Business Capabilities
Packaged Business Capabilities segment your key processes into independent modules. They reduce interdependencies and speed up enhancements without impacting the entire system.
Understanding the Principle of Packaged Business Capabilities
Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs) are self-contained functional blocks dedicated to a specific business capability. Each PBC includes its own logic, data storage, and interface.
This approach relies on the principle of separation of concerns (Domain-Driven Design): by decoupling functionalities, you avoid side effects and simplify maintenance. The scope of each PBC is defined according to the company’s strategic objectives.
Concretely, a PBC can handle billing, inventory management, or authentication. Teams can improve or replace a PBC without verifying compatibility across the entire platform.
Advantages of Functional Isolation
Isolation through PBCs enhances flexibility: each module can be deployed independently and evolve at its own pace. Unit and integration tests target a narrow scope, reducing regression risk.
Scalability is also optimized: you can allocate dedicated resources to the most in-demand modules without overprovisioning the whole system. This granularity facilitates scaling and peak-load management.
Finally, this approach follows an open-source, vendor-neutral logic, avoiding closed proprietary solutions. PBCs encourage reusing existing building blocks and limit vendor lock-in.
Concrete Example: A Mid-Sized Manufacturing Company
A Swiss precision-machining firm segmented its customer order management into a dedicated PBC. Previously, every sales-flow update disrupted its monolithic ERP and halted production.
After decomposition, the order-management PBC was deployed independently and connected via an API-first approach to the existing ecosystem. Teams could adjust manufacturing priority rules in half a day instead of three weeks.
This case shows how PBC modularity can transform a rigid platform into an agile ecosystem that quickly integrates new business rules and supports growth.
Externalize Business Rules with a Dedicated Engine
Business rules should reside in a dedicated engine, not in code. This ensures responsiveness and adaptability without redeployment.
Rules Engines at the Heart of Composability
A centralized rules engine lets you define, store, and execute business logic outside the application code. Rules are modeled via a business user interface and stored in a single repository.
This decoupling accelerates updates: simply modify or activate a rule through the interface—no redeployment or service interruption required. Rules can be hierarchized and versioned to ensure traceability.
A configuration-driven design approach reduces developers’ burden and entrusts rule evolution to business experts, while automated testing maintains rigorous control.
Continuous Update Process
Updating business rules follows an agile cycle: proposal, validation, versioning, and production deployment. Each change undergoes auditing and automated quality checks.
Rules engines integrate via API-first into the ecosystem, orchestrated by open middleware. They can notify affected systems in real time and trigger workflows or alerts based on defined scenarios.
By centralizing rules, a company gains a unified view of its business logic, facilitates impact simulations, and drastically reduces risks associated with traditional deployments.
Concrete Example: A Cantonal Bank
A regional bank externalized its pricing and credit-approval rules into a dedicated engine. Previously, each new rate table required the IT team to recompile and redeploy multiple microservices.
After migration, retail-banking managers adjust scoring criteria and commission rules directly in the engine’s interface. New rules take effect within hours, complete with history tracking and impact assessments.
This experience demonstrates that centralizing business rules enhances responsiveness to regulatory changes and delivers measurable competitive advantage.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support companies and organizations in their digital transformation
Configuration-Driven Workflows and Flexible Orchestrations
A configured workflow engine removes the need for custom development for each business sequence. A configuration-first approach shortens lead times and reduces validation complexity.
Configuration-Driven Workflow Concept
In a configuration-driven approach, business sequences (web business workflows) are defined through a visual editor. Each scenario is stored in a human-readable, editable format.
Administrators can activate, deactivate, or modify steps without changing a single line of code. Scenario tests run automatically on the same platform, ensuring compliance with business processes.
This method fosters collaboration between technical and functional teams while maintaining up-to-date documentation and a complete evolution history.
Process Orchestration and Monitoring
The orchestration engine connects PBCs, the rules engine, and external services via APIs. It handles error retries, timeouts, and approval loops based on configured rules.
A monitoring dashboard displays real-time executions, latencies, and bottlenecks. Proactive alerts notify stakeholders immediately of any anomalies or threshold breaches.
This oversight enables rapid intervention, configuration adjustments, and performance optimization without affecting the user experience.
API-First Middleware and Technical-Functional Governance
Open, API-first middleware is the backbone of a composable architecture. Technical-functional governance tracks and secures every modification.
Principles of an API-First Architecture
The API-first approach treats every service as a consumable, documented, and versioned API. Interface contracts are defined in initial workshops with business stakeholders.
Each team builds services according to these specifications and exposes them through a secured API portal. Third-party developers and partners can integrate functionality without knowing the internal system.
This method ensures technological independence, simplifies multi-layer alignments, and allows services to be replaced or added without impacting the broader ecosystem.
Governance and Evolution Auditing
Technical-functional governance relies on an API repository where every change requires approval. Modifications are tracked, versioned, and documented automatically.
Approval workflows involving IT leadership, architects, and business owners ensure compliance with security standards and regulatory requirements. Each API version is archived to facilitate auditing.
This mechanism boosts transparency around changes, enables controlled production releases, and reduces service-interruption risks.
Concrete Example: A National Retail Chain
A retail group implemented API-first middleware to connect its POS systems, ERP, and e-commerce platform. Previously, every update demanded point-to-point development and lengthy integration tests.
The new middleware centralizes APIs and orchestrates commercial flows. Business teams draft specifications and approve API contracts via a portal—no coding required.
This case illustrates how open, governed middleware can deploy new omnichannel features in hours while ensuring data security and consistency.
The Benefits of a Composable Architecture
By isolating critical functions into PBCs, externalizing business rules, driving workflows by configuration, and adopting API-first middleware, you transform your system into an agile, modular ecosystem. Each evolution becomes faster, safer, and more cost-effective, while minimizing technical debt and vendor lock-in.
Our experts are ready to assess your current architecture, define the strategy best suited to your context, and guide you step by step toward a composable enterprise that moves at the speed of your business, supported by effective change management.
