Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As businesses continue to leverage digitalsoftware to maintain competitive advantage and improve the customer journey, we’re starting to see an alarming pattern that harms legacy organizations in Toledo who’ve been using the same workflows and tools for a long time.

When businesses begin the trek toward Digital Transformation, they tend to concentrate on customer-facing departments like Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing and neglect the Back Office. While it’s critical to improve the customer experience and correctly market your offerings, ignoring other areas that also support customers, suppliers, partners, and workers can hurt your capability 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 system creates bottlenecks, the yield of your entire organization deteriorates. For example, let’s say a company onboards a new customer in minutes but requires a long time to bring on a new employee or vendor. That’s a challenge because both your employees' abilities and your partner’s products play a important role in providing exceptional service to the customer. Therefore, if those elements are not operating smoothly, your customer is ultimately the one who is disadvantaged. Your Front Office can only be as efficient as your Back Office, and both must be incorporated in a strategic digital transformation.

The Digital Back Office

Connected Systems

Systems are connected in a logical way to support the user experience for your staff, making it more efficient for knowledge workers to utilize more than one platform. By organizing systems so that they’re talking to one another, knowledge workers can avoid extra work, make wiser judgments, and prioritize more important priorities.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing things how you’ve always done them is no longer a valid reason for shunning change in your business workflows. This stubborn attitude is destructive to any digital transformation or modernization endeavor and should be resolved through education on creating job competence and change administration. Every process should have a stated purpose, 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 merchants to have a seamless user experience as it is for your customers. Eliminating swivel chair jobs should be your first objective, particularly when staffing new staff. In the time of digital transformation, a complex onboarding work flow could hurt the well-being of your entire organization.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS tools are increasing in utilization, companies are switching more and more to Cloud and Hybrid architectures and pulling out legacy systems to remain under budget and productive.
Security Expectations

Your customers, staff, vendors, and partners all assume you will have state-of-the-art security protocols active that lessen the risk of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital era and your organization will be expected to protect it without diminishing the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Companies should make data-centric judgments while utilizing Business Intelligence applications that facilitate decision-making with a birds-eye view that uses multiple data sources and applications.
Task Automation

In the time146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, handling invoices or purchase orders should need little effort. Mundane jobs should be automated so that human capital can prioritize the most vital work.