Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As companies continue to take advantage of digitalplatforms to for customer attention and improve the buyer journey, we’re starting to see an alarming pattern that hurts legacy organizations in who’ve been working with the same processes and tools for years.

When companies begin the journey toward Digital Transformation, they tend to prioritize customer-facing departments like Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing and neglect the Back Office. While it’s important to improve the buyer journey and correctly market your offerings, neglecting certain areas that also service clients, vendors, partners, and employees can inhibit your ability to provide a smooth experience for all parties.

Our View

In our humble opinion, the Back Office is the heart of your business. If your workflow creates bottlenecks, the capacity of your entire company pays for it. For example, let’s say a business brings on a new customer in minutes but requires a month to train a new employee or supplier. That’s a challenge because both your employees' skills and your partner’s products play a critical role in providing excellent service to the customer. Therefore, if those pieces are not operating smoothly, your client is ultimately who suffers. Your Front Office can only be as capable as your Back Office, and both must be included in a strategic digital transformation.

The Digital Back Office

Connected Systems

Systems are integrated logically to aid in the user experience for your employees, making it easier for knowledge workers to access more than one system. By organizing systems so that they’re talking to one another, knowledge workers can avoid extra work, make smarter decisions, and concentrate on more important priorities.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing it the way you’ve always done it is no longer a good reason for dodging change in your business workflows. This unyielding attitude is harmful to any digital transformation or modernization goal and should be challenged through education on creating work competence and change administration. Every job should have a designated goal, require the least amount of effort, and be aligned with this greater goal.
A Seamless Experience

It’s just as vital for your staff, partners, and suppliers to have a smooth user experience as it is for your customers. Eliminating swivel chair jobs should be your first goal, particularly when onboarding new employees. In the age of digital transformation, a tedious onboarding work flow could threaten the health of your whole company.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS tools are increasing in adoption, businesses are moving more and more to Cloud and Hybrid frameworks and removing legacy systems to remain under budget and dynamic.
Security Expectations

Your customers, workers, vendors, and partners all anticipate you having modernized security best practices in place that lessen the chance of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital era and your organization will be expected to protect it without hurting the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Organizations should make data-centric judgments while employing Business Intelligence software that enable decision-making with a birds-eye view that utilizes multiple data sources and systems.
Task Automation

In the time146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, processing invoices or purchase orders should involve little human intervention. Mundane jobs should be automated so that human assets can focus on the most vital tasks.