Back Office Solutions

What is a the back office?

Traditionally the back office referred to the part of a company where administrative duties were performed. The back office as its name suggests was an office at the back of the shop or company and off limits to customers and the general public.

Nowadays this analogy is carried over into the IT world. There are parts of a company's IT that should be available to the general public such as the company's website, and parts that should not, such as internal networks (often referred to as an intranets) accessed only by staff. The intranet is the foundation of the back office and is helps staff utilize resources such as printers, shared disks and databases etc.

What is the solution?

There is no one all encompassing solution that will fit all of your company's needs out of the box. The more adaptable a package is the more complex it is to customize and the less adaptable a product is to use the more difficult it is to make it suit your company's requirements. In this situation it is best to take a modular approach.

This usually takes the form of a company portal where the staff have access to various modules and processes directly from the home page. These include features like those listed below.

• Centralized Information – The ability to have one place to quickly get your staff the information they need to do their jobs.
• Collaboration Tools- Tools that allow your staff to work together more effectively by integrating existing mediums such as email and office applications.
• Document and Content Management - Having a comprehensive system to create document templates administer their permissions and status. This can also be made to extend to cover web site content previewing and publishing.
• Work Flows – Create and manage process which carry documents and data through a series of stages designed to mimic real-life businesses process in your company.
• Record Management – Keeping all your client, staff, invoice, product information in an secure accessible format so the right information is available to the right people at the right time.

Depending on the requirements of your organization there are some very flexible products available that cover these core aspects and allow for extra functionality to be appended in a modular way. METHOD IT recommends the open source Alfreso and Microsoft Sharepoint products.

Why does my company need a back office solution?

The mission of the back office system is to carry out all of the critical every day, repetitive, time consuming tasks allowing employees and business owners to focus their time on other areas. The ideal solution integrates seamlessly with current business processes by being low-maintanance and supportive to existing staff.

Many one-size-fits-all software packages that set out to achieve this exist for businesses in areas such as accounting and human resources for example. However, this can fall short of providing the productivity, efficiency and cost saving benefits of a more integrated holistic approach. The goal of the back office solution should be to provide an intuitive, tailor-made service that reaches in to all of the areas of your business, bringing them together to form a transparent, coherent, streamlined system.

What kinds of solution can METHOD IT provide?

We at METHOD IT have experience integrating and developing systems to support a range of businesses. It is critical to sit down with business managers and employees to understand fully how the business functions as part of the consulting process. This allows to identify the fundamental requirements that underpin the business processes. From these requirements we can develop modules and components to add to your existing back office system or build you a completely new system that leverages the latest technology to make your business as efficient, productive and effective as possible.

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