Back Office Modernization in the Age of Digital Transformation

As companies continue to take advantage of digitalsoftware to maintain competitive advantage and improve the buyer journey, we’re beginning to see an alarming trend that hurts legacy organizations in Lexington who’ve been using the same processes and tools for years.

When businesses begin the journey 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 customer journey and correctly market your services, forgetting about certain areas that also help customers, vendors, partners, and staff can hinder your capability to provide a smooth experience for everyone.

Our View

From our perspective, the Back Office is the heart of your business. If your process flow creates bottlenecks, the productivity of your entire company suffers. For example, let’s say a organization acquires a new customer in minutes but requires several weeks to bring on a new employee or supplier. That’s an issue because both your employees' abilities and your supplier’s products play a important role in providing excellent service to the customer. Therefore, if those elements are not operating smoothly, your customer is ultimately the one who pays the price. Your Front Office can only be as capable as your Back Office, and both must be considered during a strategic digital transformation.

The Digital Back Office

Connected Systems

Systems are integrated in a logical way to aid in the user experience for your workers, making it smoother for knowledge workers to access more than one platform. By organizing systems so that they’re communicating with one another, knowledge workers can avoid double work, make wiser decisions, and prioritize more critical tasks.
Purpose Driven Processes

Doing it the way you’ve always done it is no longer a good reason for avoiding change in your business protocols. This inflexible attitude is detrimental to any digital transformation or modernization endeavor and should be challenged through education on creating task efficiency and change administration. Every job should have a stated purpose, require the least amount of effort, and be aligned with this strategic initiative.
A Seamless Experience

It’s just as critical for your staff, partners, and suppliers to have a seamless user experience as it is for your clients. Eliminating swivel chair tasks should be your first goal, particularly when hiring new hires. In the era of digital transformation, a cumbersome onboarding work flow could threaten the livelihood of your whole organization.
Cloud, SaaS, Hybrid Transition

While Cloud and SaaS platforms are increasing in adoption, businesses are migrating more and more to Cloud and Hybrid structures and removing legacy systems to remain under budget and efficient.
Security Expectations

Your customers, workers, suppliers, and partners all expect you to have state-of-the-art security protocols active that reduce the chance of a breach. Knowledge is power in the this digital generation and your organization will be expected to protect it without diminishing the user experience.
Intelligent Decision-Making
Organizations should make data-based judgments while using Business Intelligence applications that empower decision-making with a birds-eye view that uses multiple data sources and tools.
Task Automation

In the time146] of Intelligent Automation and Machine Learning, handling invoices or purchase orders should involve minimal human intervention. Mundane jobs should be automated so that human assets can focus on the most mission-critical jobs.