Why business composability is key to manufacturing success

Building resilience with composability

Although commonly associated with software companies, at a conceptual level, composability is about more than just tech. Gartner defines business composability through four principles: Modularity, autonomy, orchestration, and discovery. The goal? An organization that can easily adapt and scale in response to:

• Volatile market demands
• Tightening regulatory restrictions
• Changing customer needs
• Material shortages and logistical hurdles

While business composability is useful for any organization, such as brands and retailers, it’s especially critical for manufacturers and other industrial B2B businesses. That’s because manufacturers are often part of complex supply chains and networks. In other words, there are many aspects outside of your control, whether raw material extraction or customer shipping and logistics. The smallest disruption to any components can significantly impact operations at a moment’s notice; preparing modular contingencies is vital to creating a composable enterprise.

Composable business models can help manufacturers build resilience even amidst such unpredictability. For example, if another global disruption occurs—whether another pandemic, trade restrictions, or raw material shortage—composable business architecture lets you adapt quickly. Rather than a full-scale overhaul, you simply swap out the affected component, whether that’s switching suppliers, pivoting to new products, or reconfiguring workflows.

As distribution grows more complex (and budgets tighter), you need adaptable tools and technology to help streamline that complexity, allowing you to scale even with moving parts.  

How composability solves supply chain issues

Business composability in manufacturing also supports “ground-up” approaches to problem-solving. This can be crucial in supply chains that often encompass a vast number of actors and stakeholders across many geographies. The competitive advantages to business composability and modular architecture could especially benefit manufacturers in rapidly evolving sectors, such as:

• Fashion and textiles
• Automotive industries
• Construction companies

As regional compliance regulations tighten and ethical sourcing grows more critical, responsive production strategies will no doubt be needed.

In practice, this ground-up approach (or, per Gartner, the “autonomy” element of business composability) means enabling those closest to a problem in a supply chain to take the lead in solving it, as opposed to waiting for a top-down solution. For example, consider the response if the dye used in textiles sourced by a fashion brand suddenly suffers a shortage. Companies embracing composability principles would regard the dye as one component of production and position the supplier to identify and source a replacement.

The flexibility of composable architecture makes it simpler to adapt, improve, and recalibrate various components as your business evolves—especially across product content creation, supplier onboarding, and channel expansion.

As Forbes explains, business composability offers “an emergent manufacturing system that fuels continuous improvement within your specific, unique operation. Rather than setting it and forgetting it, composability encourages the opposite. It provides your operators with a set of tools that can solve their problems both today and tomorrow.”

The impact of composability on the end user 

The importance of business composability in manufacturing is clear, particularly for supply chain management. But manufacturers taking a composable approach can also pass these benefits onto their customers.

For example, a manufacturer achieving composability with its tech stack means it can:

• Respond faster and more effectively to the changing needs of buyers
• Pivot to wider shifts in market dynamics without affecting end users
• Leverage emerging technology such as AI to optimize customer experiences

As commerce evolves across marketplaces, retailers, and direct-to-consumer channels, only businesses with agile product data infrastructure will be able to meet growing expectations for transparency, speed, and personalization. 

The fully composable manufacturing tech stack 

When compared to the legacy monolithic systems so many manufacturers still rely on today, the benefits of embracing a fully composable future are clear.

For product-focused businesses, Gartner believes that “PIM is the natural first step to providing the foundation for a successful digital commerce strategy” and a core part of an omnichannel-geared composable architecture. Gartner also predicts that enterprises embracing business composability could improve the speed of digital innovation by 60% by 2026.

A composable PIM isn’t just a central hub for product data—it’s a strategic engine that supports rapid product launches, channel-specific customization, and cross-functional collaboration.

A composable PIM solution also lets you integrate other key business-critical applications, such as digital asset management (DAM), further centralizing all aspects of product management. Gartner believes that PIM designed with composability in mind lets you incorporate “best-of-breed applications”, in every area—from supplier onboarding to order management.