Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As companies continue to take advantage of digitalsoftware to for customer attention and improve the customer journey, we’re starting to see an alarming pattern that negatively impacts legacy organizations in Cleveland who’ve been utilizing the same processes and tools for years.

When companies begin the trek toward Digital Transformation, they tend to focus on customer-facing departments like Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing and neglect the Back Office. While it’s vital to improve the buyer journey and correctly market your products and services, forgetting about other parts of the company that also service clients, vendors, partners, and workers can hinder your capability to provide a efficient experience for all parties.

Our View

In our humble opinion, the Back Office is the heart of your business. If your system creates slow downs, the productivity of your entire business pays for it. For example, let’s say a organization onboards a new customer in minutes but requires a month to onboard a new employee or vendor. That’s a problem because both your employees' skills and your supplier’s products play a vital role in providing excellent service to the customer. Therefore, if those pieces are not operating accurately, your customer is ultimately who pays the price. 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 unified logically to aid in the user experience for your staff, making it easier for knowledge workers to utilize more than one platform. By aligning systems so that they’re communicating with one another, knowledge workers can avoid extra work, make smarter decisions, and focus on more vital tasks.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing things how you’ve always done them is no longer a valid reason for shunning change in your company workflows. This inflexible mindset is detrimental to any digital transformation or modernization initiative and should be confronted through education on creating job expertise and change management. Every job should have a specific goal, require the least amount of effort, and be aligned with this greater purpose.
A Seamless Experience

It’s just as vital for your workers, partners, and vendors to have a smooth user experience as it is for your clients. Eliminating inefficient tasks should be your first goal, particularly when onboarding new hires. In the age of digital transformation, a complex onboarding experience could hurt the livelihood of your entire organization.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS tools are increasing in adoption, companies are switching more and more to Cloud and Hybrid frameworks and removing legacy systems to remain cost-effective and productive.
Security Expectations

Your customers, staff, vendors, and partners all assume you will have modernized security best practices implemented that lessen the risk of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital era and your business will be expected to defend it without sacrificing the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Companies should make data-driven decisions while utilizing Business Intelligence applications that enable decision-making with a 360-degree view that uses multiple data sources and applications.
Task Automation

In the time146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, preparing invoices or purchase orders should require little manpower. Mundane processes should be automated so that human capital can prioritize the most important tasks.