Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As companies continue to leverage digitaltools to maintain competitive advantage and improve the buyer journey, we’re seeing an alarming trend that harms legacy organizations in Portland who’ve been using the same protocols 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 critical to improve the customer journey and properly market your offerings, forgetting about certain areas that also help customers, merchants, partners, and staff can inhibit your ability to provide a seamless experience for everyone.

Our View

From our perspective, the Back Office is the heart of your company. If your workflow creates inefficiencies, the yield of your entire company pays for it. For example, let’s say a company acquires a new customer in minutes but requires a month to train a new employee or supplier. That’s an issue because both your employees' talent and your vendor’s products play a vital role in providing exceptional 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 integrated logically to facilitate the user experience for your employees, making it smoother for knowledge workers to access more than one system. By arranging systems so that they’re interacting with one another, knowledge workers can avoid double work, make smarter decisions, and focus on more vital priorities.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing things how you’ve always done them is no longer a valid excuse for avoiding change in your business processes. This inflexible mindset is detrimental to any digital transformation or modernization goal and should be confronted through education on creating work expertise and change control. Every process should have a designated objective, require the least amount of effort, and be aligned with this strategic initiative.
A Seamless Experience

It’s just as important for your employees, partners, and vendors to have a seamless user experience as it is for your customers. Eliminating swivel chair tasks should be your first goal, particularly when hiring new hires. In the era of digital transformation, a cumbersome onboarding experience could hurt the livelihood of your entire business.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS tools are increasing in utilization, businesses are migrating more and more to Cloud and Hybrid frameworks and retiring legacy systems to remain under budget and efficient.
Security Expectations

Your customers, employees, suppliers, and partners all assume you will have modernized security best practices in place that minimize the chance of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital generation and your business will be expected to keep it safe without diminishing the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Organizations should make data-based decisions while utilizing Business Intelligence applications that empower decision-making with a 360-degree view that leverages multiple data sources and systems.
Task Automation

In the age146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, preparing invoices or purchase orders should involve little effort. Banal processes should be automated so that human capital can concentrate on the most vital jobs.