The personnel & engaged systems in the administration and support form a company’s back office. They don’t have to come up front and deal with customers directly. However, they can be elemental in generating leads, providing support to customers, managing accounting records, complying with rules and regulations, and handling IT services.
Simply put, a back office consists of all administrative tasks that cover a range of the company’s operations. These all can be legal, financial, HR, accounting, and other areas that keep it up and running. These all are the elements that can help a company scale up.
Business operations should run in continuity with effectiveness and speed. This can be possible if you adopt adaptive methods and technologies. Simply put, you need to introduce automation for keeping your company alive and profitable.
Need of Automation
However, we have typical methods for managing and steadily supporting various processes and workflows. But, they appear outdated when you have colossal deliveries in the pipeline and the time is running out. Certainly, automation can sail you through this situation. After all, it’s trending. You can easily opt it in and help your team to reinvent your business operations. The introduction of technologies can also make optimisation of resources easier and quicker.
Take into account that the back office actually proves the backbone of your company. It strongly assists your operations and administration to achieve scalability and results. Even, your front-runner staff cannot be strong, effective, and progressive unless you have equally effective back-office operations.
Above that, you can have more savings between 20% and 60%, which is the projection of EY. It shows that you can save such a big percentage of your full-time employee costs with automation.
Topmost Departments Where Automation is a Must for Back-Office
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Automation for Back Office
The future is studded with technology-driven transformation. RPA aka Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is worldwide getting popular for transforming typical business methods. With RPA, it’s like a walkover to build, deploy, and manage software-powered bots to copy human actions. These can be like filtering typos in your database, scheduling meetings in a calendar, or anything like that. These technologies bring about back-office operational efficiencies at much-reduced costs and faster turnaround time.
In simpler words, back office practices can be turned on 24/7 using technologies and their cognitive capabilities, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and logical reasoning. These capabilities can accelerate productivity and performance like never before happened.
AI and RPA are leveraging back-office automation possibilities. They can fit in any scenario, making your workforce digitally active and able to make decisions in no time using tools like PEGA, which is a business process management tool for back office work.
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Automation of Accounts Payable
Accounts payable departments don’t have many resources oftentimes. The situation becomes really challenging when the invoices are more and their processing seems time taking. It seems daunting for competent staff members to get it done eight hours a day.
Fortunately, there are organizations that have welcomed accounts payable automation. They receive around 70% of all invoices over email or online, which are easily processed in no time. This is extremely valuable to save so much time and cost, eliminating the need for manual data entry of invoices. Some powerful AI bots are there to automatically scrape and validate data of digitised invoices. Moreover, matching these invoices with purchase orders, and delivery proofs hardly take a few minutes. The platforms like ERP make the entire processing of orders and transactions lightning-fast
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Automation of Accounts Receivables
Account receivables denote the amount that is due to a firm for goods or services delivered. It can be a due balance, which is yet to be paid by customers. Managing these transactions is indeed no less than an uphill battle for businesses. It’s a cumbersome and time-taking exercise.
Typically, a person is appointed to manually key in data from incoming purchase orders and then, process it from one transaction book to another. This is actually a painful & sluggish process, which has a big scope for errors.
Accounts receivables consist of Order Processing, Order Fulfillment, Invoicing, and Cash Allocation. These all are different but interrelated functions, which automation can simplify. You can have such systems in place that can automatically capture incoming orders. This can be further split into automatically drafting downstream documents and keying in the order database via ERP solutions. It can help financial institutions or companies to cut short their long days-to-pay times. This speedy collection ensures cash flow in a better & automatic way.
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Employee Hiring Process
Human resource management is the busiest department that helps in onboarding, engaging, and retaining the workforce. The biggest reason for their inefficiency is typical onboarding methods, which often lead to bad hires.
The CareerBuilder survey states that 75 percent of employers were bad hires, which adversely impacted their business in the last year. One bad hire costs them nearly $17,000 on average.
This loss can be minimized by speeding up the onboarding process. Some tools can also help in finding the best-fit skills by filling out standard forms, sending out notifications, and populating various databases related to employee onboarding automatically. The tools like Whatfix can help in initiating the onboarding experience in a personalised way.
The tools like this can save hundreds of hours and the list of current and prospective hires automatically without any errors or glitches. In addition, you don’t have to get trapped in a massive email trail.
So finally, the human resource department can have sufficient time to think out of the box for taking strategic initiatives and improving the overall employee experience.
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IT Support
The IT support has to address technical issues, such instance, patches, data migration, change management, asset management, and reporting of incidents.
Many of these requests are repeated in nature and also, payable. A manual support system can be lengthy and may lead to delays, which results in the idleness of resources. It certainly puts an extra burden on the budgeting, and the delays attract major losses.
A ticketing system can save their day. It can automatically inform via a ticket raised by the needy employee. The notification instantly alarms the IT support team to come up with their assistive services. Even, the bot can redirect him/her to some tutorials, which can resolve the matter without needing any manual support. It’s the best approach for quickly addressing simple technical errors like optimizing data on a system, updating software, and more. This hands-free solution provides them with enough time to focus on priorities and innovation.
Besides, the analytics of instance management or patches can help in foreseeing challenges. It helps in triggering fixes as soon as the problem arises. This proactive approach can be executed via digital innovation to fully support the back office automatically.
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Business Transformation
A survey stated that 60% of customer dissatisfaction originated in the back office. It’s true that businesses have been digitising core practices for over two decades. They are sheltering under the enterprise resource planning tools and the alternative to outsource business process management systems to transform their back-office practices.
Leveraging technology-driven transformation can bring obvious changes. But, all are not equally effective or fair enough to deliver an excellent user experience. Enterprises today have an average of over 150 applications. And if you consider large organizations, this number can be in the tens of thousands.
A clever selection of these applications or software can remove all back-office challenges that you face due to legacy systems, siloed data sources, and manual data entry processes. They can be turned better and significantly used for delivering the best customer experience.
Summary
There are multiple back-office operations that require automation. The HR department can require it for quick onboarding or talent acquisition. The finance & accounting department can quicken the process of accounts receivable and payable. Also, IT support can be availed in no time to the needy staff.
