B2B: Use IT to Achieve High Quality of Service

Business process management is not easy for companies with more than 100 employees. However, when the headcount reaches over 2,000, focus on improved management transparency alone becomes inefficient, and there comes a time to ensure the company's capacity for self-regulation and sustainable development. The cornerstone to this is information technology.

Make clients happy

It is now possible to obtain information about how each employee works and what he or she is being paid for at any point during business hours. Using a specific solution called a business process management system, one can see exactly who is holding up the process, for example, who is delaying contract approval. It is also possible to detect business process bottlenecks in general. With this knowledge it is easier to optimize the process and improve the quality of the company's services.

Control financial and project management

When managing services, there are two important things: improvement of economic efficiency of project operations and work facilitation for employees, because the quality of work directly effects final deliverables. In the first case, the automation of project management processes can solve several problems at once. First, it enables precise control over the cost of work and allows you to remain within the budget. Second, it allows for the monitoring of employee workload at any point in time, something that is particularly important when dealing with highly skilled professionals.

In order to quickly modify employee rates and plan project resources, a business rule management system can be implemented — a solution that makes life in the financial department much easier. Before the implementation, the performance of annual economic efficiency calculations required accountants to spend several busy days processing metrics (about 1 million algorithms). Today, this process takes no more than three hours. It is possible to run a two-year financial analysis of a complex project costing $20 million with up to 10% accuracy — something that seemed almost unreal before.

Infrastructure costs go down, and core business competitiveness increases

Outsourcing is the future of information technology. Over time, companies will no longer maintain non-core business units (such as IT departments for a majority of companies which are not systems integrators). In some companies, this is already happening. For example, competition within the retail sector is very high and retailers are thus forced to maximize savings to the last penny; they value outsourcing as a way to optimize costs. One large retailer went beyond IT outsourcing and outsourced its entire accounting record achieving business process. As part of this engagement, several truck-loads of waybills and shipment documents were digitalized, categorized and downloaded to a virtual data center. Over a five-year period, a cloud archive of accounting records will cost on average 2 to 3 times less than the total cost of ownership of an electronic archive. The future belongs to such projects.

Today, there are many technologies to simplify company management and improve operational efficiency. The important thing is to start using them.