Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As organizations continue to take advantage of digitalplatforms to maintain competitive advantage and improve the buyer journey, we’re beginning to see an alarming pattern that negatively impacts legacy organizations in Chandler who’ve been using the same workflows and software for a long time.

When businesses 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, forgetting about other parts of the company that also support customers, vendors, partners, and workers can hinder your ability to provide a seamless experience for everyone involved.

Our View

In our humble opinion, the Back Office is the foundation of your company. If your workflow creates slow downs, the productivity of your entire organization deteriorates. For example, let’s say a organization acquires a new customer in minutes but requires a month to spin up a new employee or supplier. That’s a challenge because both your employees' talent and your supplier’s products play a crucial role in providing exemplary service to the customer. Therefore, if those elements are not operating efficiently, your client is ultimately the one who pays the price. Your Front Office can only be as efficient as your Back Office, and both must be included in a strategic digital transformation.

The Digital Back Office

Connected Systems

Systems are unified intuitively to support the user experience for your employees, making it easier for knowledge workers to use more than one system. By organizing systems so that they’re interacting with one another, knowledge workers can avoid duplicative work, make better choices, and focus on more important tasks.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing it the way you’ve always done it is no longer a good reason for shunning change in your company workflows. This stubborn attitude is harmful to any digital transformation or modernization endeavor and should be challenged through education on creating task efficiency and change control. Every task should have a stated objective, require minimal effort, and be aligned with this strategic initiative.
A Seamless Experience

It’s just as critical for your workers, partners, and merchants to have a seamless user experience as it is for your customers. Eliminating swivel chair jobs should be your first priority, particularly when staffing new staff. In the era of digital transformation, a cumbersome hiring process could diminish the livelihood of your whole organization.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS applications are increasing in use, organizations are moving more and more to Cloud and Hybrid architectures and pulling out legacy systems to remain under budget and efficient.
Security Expectations

Your customers, employees, vendors, and partners all expect you to have modernized security best practices in place that lessen the possibility of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital generation and your business will be expected to defend it without diminishing the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Companies should make data-based choices while employing Business Intelligence tools that enable decision-making with a 360-degree view that uses multiple data sources and systems.
Task Automation

In the time146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, preparing invoices or purchase orders should require minimal effort. Day-to-day tasks should be automated so that human assets can prioritize the most vital jobs.