Digitalization and the back office: Getting it Right

With the chemical industry ramping up net-zero programs, companies need to improve back-office operations to free up funds for those initiatives. Fortunately, they have an opportunity to move beyond labor arbitrage and instead focus on improving productivity with digital technology.

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Today, back-office digital transformation initiatives can draw on an array of solutions—no-touch processing, human-machine interactions, self-service capabilities and artificial intelligence, to name a few. But the path a company takes to the new technology can be as important as the technology itself—and it can be key to the ultimate effectiveness of digitalization efforts.

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With that in mind, my colleagues and I recently analyzed 10 back-office digital transformation programs conducted in the last three years to determine what works and what doesn’t in these initiatives. This allowed us to identify several key success factors related to targeting initiatives to the right pain points; leveraging existing technology alongside new technology to accelerate efforts; and building flexibility for the future into technology and processes.

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Our analysis also found that the benefits of getting these back-office transformations right can be significant. We saw cost reductions of up to 40% and found that digitalization often helps increase service quality with, for example, HR self-service platforms. It could even have a top-line impact because it can enable new business models.

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The full story of our analysis has been published in a new blog. I hope you’ll read it and share your comments with me.