In e-commerce, agility is everything. You must be ready to shift on a dime with customer expectations and rapid digital transformation. All of which puts consumer products companies under more pressure to modernize than ever.
But I see a familiar challenge across the consumer products and e-commerce sectors: the systems that built the business are now holding it back. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms — especially those running on IBM i — remain incredibly reliable, but they weren’t designed for the speed and adaptability that modern digital commerce demands.
This tension between stability and agility is one of the defining struggles of business modernization. Companies want to innovate quickly, but they can’t afford to disrupt the core systems that manage their inventory, supply chains and transactions.
So how can these businesses move forward? The solution can be found in low-code development.
The Challenge: Modern Demands, Legacy Constraints
For years, modernization meant rewriting code, migrating data and hoping not to break what already worked. But that’s an increasingly outdated model. Today’s businesses need ways to move faster, to deliver new digital experiences and workflows while preserving the investments they’ve already made.
Low-code platforms allow exactly that. They make it possible to build modern applications that run natively alongside existing ERP environments, drawing directly from the same data sources but bypassing the slow, resource-intensive development cycles of traditional programming.
At CNX, we’ve seen this model accelerate modernization timelines by an order of magnitude. Projects that once required months can now be completed in weeks or even days. The results are not theoretical. They’re happening in the field every day.
A Case in Point: Modernizing a Global Consumer Brand
A prime example comes from MBI, a global producer of luxury collectibles. Like many established manufacturers and retailers, MBI built its business around IBM i systems. These systems had served the company well for decades, handling everything from inventory management to customer transactions.
But they were becoming a bottleneck.
Legacy interfaces frustrated younger employees. Development backlogs delayed innovation. And with RPG programmers retiring faster than they could be replaced, MBI faced growing risks around both continuity and scalability.
By adopting our low-code platform, MBI was able to modernize its business without rewriting its ERP. Within minutes of starting development, its IT team was creating fully functional web applications that previously required extensive hours of PHP or Java development.
That kind of speed doesn’t just streamline operations. It changes how teams think about innovation.
At MBI, applications began going live in weeks instead of months. New customer service tools reduced onboarding time from two weeks to two days. Complex manual reporting processes were replaced by interactive dashboards and icon-driven apps.
It’s been years since MBI first adopted our low-code solution, and they’ve now built hundreds of applications for nearly every area of the business. From analytical dashboards for executives to interfaces for specialized divisions to real-time inventory management, these apps have put more control directly into the hands of their employees.
This is what it typically looks like at companies who embrace low-code application environments. While mainframes remain the backbone of operations, the applications built on top of them look and feel nothing like the green-screen past. The intuitive, mobile-friendly user interfaces give workforces the modern experiences they expect while preserving the reliability and stability of IBM i.
And because low-code solutions separate business logic from database logic, MBI actually reduced the processing load on its IBM i environment. This will extend the lifespan of its existing infrastructure while delivering a far better user experience.
Solving the RPG Talent Gap and Empowering Digital Teams
The e-commerce landscape thrives on rapid experimentation — A/B testing, personalization, predictive analytics — but legacy systems weren’t designed for that level of flexibility. Adding to the challenge is the ongoing shortage of RPG developers capable of maintaining those systems.
Low-code development provides a way to evolve beyond that dependency on RPG devs. It allows organizations to preserve their back-end reliability while opening development to new contributors — including non-developers.
Companies using low-code solutions can empower “super users” — team members who understand the data and business processes but not traditional coding — to build their own applications. That democratization of development changes the game, freeing up IT departments to focus on higher-value strategic projects while operational staff create their own tools to solve their own daily operational challenges.
The result is a more innovative, empowered organization overall.
What Low-Code Means for e-commerce
e-commerce is an arena defined by speed. It rewards rapid fulfillment, real-time analytics, omnichannel coordination and seamless customer experiences. But behind every slick frontend lies a complex operational structure that depends on legacy systems.
Low-code development enables those systems to participate in digital transformation without being replaced. It gives retailers and manufacturers the ability to build lightweight, scalable interfaces that plug directly into their existing data sources and support everything from dynamic pricing and inventory visibility to customer support automation and executive dashboards.
For e-commerce leaders, this means modernization without disruption. It’s a practical way to improve agility, efficiency and customer experience, all while maintaining the reliability of the systems that keep orders moving and margins intact.
A Smarter Path to e-commerce Modernization
At CNX, we’ve built our philosophy around one simple belief: that the true purpose of technology is to be helpful. By that measure, modernization shouldn’t be destructive; it should be a natural evolutionary process.
In other words, businesses don’t need to abandon their proven platforms to achieve digital agility. They just need the right tools to extend them intelligently. The future of e-commerce and consumer product operations won’t be defined by which systems companies replace, but by how effectively they connect and extend the ones they already have.
MBI’s story is one of many that proves what’s possible through low-code solutions. Hundreds of applications now power MBI’s operations — each one built faster, maintained more easily, and used more intuitively than its predecessors.
That’s the sort of evolutionary change that low-code development makes possible.
Rob has worked as an in-the-trenches IBM i developer since 1992, with the past 15 years focused on developing modernization efforts for legacy systems written in RPG. Currently serving as Senior Partner for CNX Corporation in Chicago, Rob is a strong advocate of introducing highly user-friendly web and mobile applications to conventional RPG shops.
