Moving the Back Office to the Front Desk

By?Terry May ?

Moving the Back Office to the Front Desk

With organizations across industries now moving at light speed toward?digital transformation ?and digitization, thanks mainly to the COVID-19 pandemic that forced businesses to expedite these plans to survive, it’s become clear that a disconnect and lagging affect is growing between the front office and the back office. The back office can't keep pace with the front office.?

But when you think about it, this disparity does make a lot of sense.???

• ?The two offices typically work independently and rarely interact.?
• ?It is the customer-facing front office (HR, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Field Service, etc.) that’s driving the urgent demand for businesses to transform: adopt new business models,?cloud infrastructures , and?Agile ?and?DevOps ?best practices to optimize workflows, business processes, applications, services, and worker productivity, and most importantly, to meet the new and evolving customer needs.?
• ?The often neglected and overlooked back office is using processes and technologies that have remained the same for decades.??

The back office is where the majority of the manual, repetitive, mundane tasks and transactions take place, such as payment processing, invoicing, recordkeeping, bookkeeping, data entry, and administration. In the age of automation, it shouldn't take much human intervention to process an invoice, for example, but it does.?That‘s because the back office hasn't been preparing for the digital future like the front office.??

In the case of digital transformation, the consequences of overlooking the back office can have far-reaching ramifications that reverberate across the organization and negatively impact the customer experience. For example, if the back office is not transformed (still relying on legacy, disparate systems, and manual processes), businesses can be slow to react to evolving market changes and experience delays in processing information or responding to customers, partners, and suppliers.??

So, as much as the front office is quickly moving to fulfill the new customer needs, desires, and expectations through digital transformation and digitization, the back office has fallen way short and can’t keep up with the velocity of the transformed front office.??

Digital transformation’s end game is inclusive?

For organizations to achieve true business transformation in today’s digital economy and workforce (i.e., thrive, not just survive), they must transform and automate as many processes as possible from end to end, not just the customer-facing front end. In other words, the front office and the back office should work together as a single system with no bottlenecks, delays, or disruptions so the two offices can function as a single harmonious unit—an autonomous machine, so to speak.?

Businesses can capitalize on a substantial competitive edge with end-to-end business transformation (i.e., marrying the front office with the back office). Survey findings by?Accenture and HfS ?reflect the breadth of the challenges and opportunities:?

• Nearly 50% of today’s organizations claim their back office isn’t keeping up with their front office needs.?
• 80% of organizations point to siloed internal processes as the biggest obstacle to reaching their business goals.?
• Organizations expect a 22% cost savings and a 21% revenue increase in three years due to transforming their back office.?

End-to-end digital transformation strikes the right balance between human workers and their digital co-workers with the aim to digitize, streamline, and automate all areas of an organization (front, center, back, and everywhere in between) so workers and teams can focus on more engaging, productive, higher-value, strategic work that helps propel businesses forward today, such as optimizing compliance, security, transparency, products, services, and customer experiences.??

Are you ready to transform your back office to reap the full benefits of end-to-end?digital transformation ? We have you covered.?Xpanxion ?has deep experience helping organizations across industries modernize their front- and back-office offices. We embrace?Agile ?and?DevOps ?best practices, harness advanced automation, and build modern?cloud ?architectures to prepare our clients for the all-digital, automated future. To learn more about back office transformation, click?here ?to speak to our experts.?

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