PCNA Transforms Business Responsiveness with FlexRule Open Decision Intelligence Platform
About PCNA
PCNA is the world’s leading supplier of promotional products, offering the largest and most diverse collection of gift options across several brands, including Leed’s, Bullet, Trimark, JournalBooks, ETS Express, and Spoke Custom. With a strong commitment to innovation, PCNA is a key player in the promotional products industry, providing a broad selection of products that includes eco-friendly options.
Background and Before FlexRule
Over the years, PCNA has developed numerous custom solutions to manage business rules and decisions, particularly those governing pricing generation and order flow. These systems, while functional, have become increasingly complex, with layers of rules accumulated over two decades. Much of this functionality is hardcoded into web applications, making even minor changes time-consuming and inefficient. Each adjustment requires extensive regression testing and lengthy implementation processes, creating significant challenges.
This IT-driven dependency forces all change requests to go through IT, leading to bottlenecks and reducing the organization's responsiveness. Recognizing the limitations of their existing systems, PCNA identified the need for a more agile and flexible solution to improve efficiency and adapt quickly to market demands.
Impacts of Traditional Approach
IT and Software Development Bottleneck
Reliance on code driven approach and IT reducing the organization's responsiveness and is time-consuming. Additionally, requires full regression tests.
Manual Workarounds Led to Inefficiencies
Reliance on Excel templates to fill system gaps created inefficiencies, making it harder to track new and current products.
Data and Decision-Making Challenges
The lack of accurate and centralized data disrupted decision support, leading to errors and inconsistent outcomes.
Solution with Decision-Centric Approach®
Decision-Centric Approach® is a methodology that brings people, rules, data, and processes together to ensure organizations can consistently make optimized, customer-centric, and situation-aware business decisions while they meet the objectives on revenue, costs, and mitigating risks.
Easy to Use for Non-Technical and Technical teams
Our Decision-Centric Approach® powers the changes of workflow and efficiencies of PCNA organization and increases the efficiency of Software Development with its ease of use. Our platform enables collaboration across teams for creating, updating, testing, deploying and integrating decisions and rules with its unique and easy-to-use User Interface for all non-technical & technical stakeholders:
- Non-technical team: Digital (web), Business analyst and SME in pricing
- Technical team: Software development and DevOps
“We saw our first benefits right away when a non-developer was able to not only update and expand a rule but also check it into the built-in source control and deploy that rule to Azure for consumption by the web team without direct developer involvement.”
Edward Streiff , Senior Manager – Application Development
Adopting OPEN Decision Intelligence Platform to Unify Everything
The Open Decision Intelligence Platform provides a unified and easy way to manage business decisions, rules and processes. This unified platform is designed not only to make the workflows seamless but also bring the true agility at the organization level.
“A unified rules engine designed to align with market dynamics and empower business users. With FlexRule, business users can independently create and update rules, eliminating the IT bottleneck. This shift allows our IT team to focus on other critical projects, enhancing overall efficiency and agility.”
Edward Streiff , Senior Manager – Application Development
Quick and Proactive Support
More importantly the true agility should be measured by the time spent to getting things done. Not only from the software development point of view, but also from delivery and outcomes.
Where the delivery and outcomes matter, the support play a big role in it. We are proud of the fact PCNA's success is our success. We go “all-in” -whatever it takes- to ensure our customers satisfaction and success, so they can exceed their objectives and goals.
“Getting someone to help has never been a problem which has been fantastic and is not always the case with other vendors.”
Edward Streiff , Senior Manager – Application Development
Key Takeaway
Decision-Centric Approach® along with the Open Decision Intelligence Platform not only solves the complexity and bottlenecks of legacy systems but also empowers business users and IT teams to operate more efficiently. This balance of usability, integration, and support positions it as a game-changer for business rules and decision automation from simple to more complex scenarios.
One of the biggest wins is that our responsiveness has improved dramatically. Small changes that used to take weeks can now be done in just days.
Bob Paczula
Senior Business analyst, PCNA
