Back Office Optimisation – The Market Awakens

Back Office Optimisation – The Market Awakens
Taken from Professional Planning Back Office Forum
May Monthly Update
Back Office Optimisation
The Market Awakens
Donna Fluss, founder and President of DMG Consulting LLC, is a recognised thought
leader in the Workforce Optimisation Market (WFM) and the leading analyst specialising
in customer-focused business strategy, operations and technology services for Global
2000 and emerging companies. Donna recently completed a research project with PPF
member eg solutions plc. Elizabeth Gooch, CEO of eg, shares some of the findings
from the research into the ‘Emerging Back Office Market’.
Donna Fluss quoted in the DMG 2011 – 2012 Contact Center Workforce Management
Market Report that “the most significant trend altering the WFM landscape is that
Elizabeth Gooch
organizations are awakening to the needs of the back office”. The problems of the
Chief Executive Officer
back office are evident across virtually every sector including manufacturing, utilities,
eg solutions plc
telecoms, financial services, healthcare and public sector. One of the issues is that
‘back office’ means different things to different people. It can include many different
functions from a single sales support person in a regional office to groups of people processing customer orders, claims or mortgages,
financial transaction processing, even HR and payroll processing. For eg it means the people behind the front line where transactions
are processed that are critical to delivering the customer experience but are often unseen by customers.
Despite significant investment in technology to automate processes, a huge proportion of customer servicing and transactional
processing remains largely manual. This is particularly the case in traditional businesses who have significant legacy technologies
to manipulate. Work arounds are an all too common feature. At the same time, customer expectations have increased because of
innovative businesses, such as Amazon, where transactions can be conducted effortlessly and with confidence that the follow-on
processes will happen as promised (snow permitting!). The result is a need to match these expectations, improve effectiveness and
reduce costs - NOW!
The combination of a new economic paradigm with greater customer expectations has encouraged businesses to realise that the
effectiveness of transactional processing is directly correlated to both the customer experience and front office demand. It doesn’t
matter how good the front office is, customer perception will be shaped by what comes after their initial transaction – all too often
failures in the processes that follow.
So what exactly are the problems that need to be addressed? Transactional processing is
difficult to manage. It suffers from significant variation, not just in defining its scope, but
also because there can be:
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Many input channels
Varied, complex and multi-stage processes
A variety of systems in use and
A high degree of manual interaction
Unlike call centres, where their one main input channel, the telephone, work can come in
many shapes and forms via many channels. As a result transactional processing is vastly
more complicated and difficult to manage than the call centre will ever be. However,
transactional processing has the scale and scope to deliver great operational efficiencies
so investing time and money to performance manage these back office areas should reap
significant financial rewards – businesses need to reduce cost.
eg solutions plc Dunston Business Village, Stafford Road, Dunston, Stafford, Staffordshire ST18 9AB, UK
Tel +44 (0) 1785 715772 Fax +44 (0) 1785 712541 Email: ask@eguk.co.uk Web www.eguk.co.uk
the most significant
trend altering
the WFM landscape is
that organizations are
awakening to the needs
of the back office
Donna Fluss
DMG 2011 – 2012 Contact Center
Workforce Management Market Report
Through a series of workshops our customers told us that they needed:
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•
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A hub that pulls together all the various work items in a single place to give a single business view of everything that needs to
be done – regardless of source
Work items sorted & presented in the order they need to be performed – including the subsequent stages of multi-stage
processes
Tools to monitor performance and anticipate problems so they don’t become crises
Historic, real-time and predictive management information - provided without the need for additional resource
Diagnostic information to support demand/failure analysis
In addition, as Donna Fluss commented in her Workforce Management Market Report,“Executives the world over have begun
to realize that they can apply the best practices, disciplines and solutions honed in the contact center to other parts of their
businesses, with the goal of reaping similar cost and efficiency benefits”.
Back Office Optimisation
An Emerging Market
The market is emerging for
solutions which can achieve
the best of both worlds; the
forecasting and resource
scheduling best practices from
the front office, together with
capabilities to manage the
problems and complexities unique
to the back office. The combined
requirements must also meet
the needs of different audiences
throughout the business.
Donna Fluss has emphasised that back office planning is not the same as front
office planning. She says “back-office WFM requires a different set of mathematical
algorithms than those used to forecast contact center calls, many of the other
challenges – such as scheduling, intra-day re-forecasting and staff self-service – are
similar. The growing interest in back-office WFM solutions has a number of contact
center WFM vendors claiming to provide this functionality. However, Erlang C does not
allow for latency, does not address backlog, and does not effectively handle multiple
channels, all of which are core requirements in back-office operating environments.
End users with back-office WFM needs should ensure that the solution they select can
effectively meet their requirements for specific back-office processes”.1
The key to choosing a back office system for your organisation is to understand
the problems that need to be addressed and to find a vendor with a track record of
delivering the full range of functionality required out of the box. Many of the solutions
on the market have been derived from experience in the front office, manufacturing
or financial management – be sure to choose a system that has been purpose built to
solve the problems of back office - a tool that will achieve your objectives and deliver
real business benefit. This is not about Marketing hype but solving a genuine problem
– how to optimise back office performance.
1
The key to choosing
a back office system
for your organisation is to
understand the problems
that need to be addressed
and to find a vendor
with a track record of
delivering the full range
of functionality required
out of the box.
DMG 2011 – 2012 Contact Center Workforce Management Market Report abstract.
eg solutions plc Dunston Business Village, Stafford Road, Dunston, Stafford, Staffordshire ST18 9AB, UK
Tel +44 (0) 1785 715772 Fax +44 (0) 1785 712541 Email: ask@eguk.co.uk Web www.eguk.co.uk
eg solutions plc is an operations management software applications vendor. Our software provides real-time, historic and predictive Operational MI.
When implemented with our training programme for Managers and Team Leaders to use this intelligence, we guarantee improvements in
operational results in short timescales.