The COVID19 pandemic has brought about many changes in our daily lives, some of these changes will be temporary and will fade as the pandemic fades. But other aspects of our daily lives, and in particular our professional lives, will be changed for the long term. Nowhere will that be felt by more people than in how the workforce is deployed. The Pre-COVID white collar workforce saw a trend towards greater movement to a remote workforce. While this trend represented a very small piece of the overall pie, certain functional areas like financial back-office were generally exempt from this trend. But that is changing rapidly as companies have been forced to adapt to a greater number of resources working remotely. Aiding in the adaption of remote work model is the proliferation of communication and collaborations tools that allow function based teams to stay engaged with each other, customers, and vendors. Applications like Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams and many others has allowed a high-level of collaboration and interaction that is vital for this model to work over the long term. What many companies have realized is that the low cost, low overhead model of a remote workforce is here to stay for many.
One functional area that had to very quickly adapt to a remote workforce model that was not planned or anticipated has been the financial back-office. Since many of the functions around the financial back-office surround processing activities, companies had to shift those resources and activities out of the controlled environment of a shared service center or centralized processing operation while still being able to manage the performance and productivity of those workers. When it comes to vendor management and vendor centric back-office functions like Accounts Payable (AP), Procurement & Purchasing, and Accounts Receivable (AR) there are three critical components to a successful remote workforce initiative:
- Applications and solutions that easily support a remote workforce;
- The ability to monitor the performance and productivity of process based activities;
- Driving more non-value add functions and activities back to the vendor by establishing a vendor self-service initiative.
ICG Consulting has helped several of it’s high transaction volume customers adapt to a remote workforce in very short order. Customers like Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores and MGM Resorts International were able to respond to the need to transition to a remote based operation quickly without sacrificing performance, service, or functionality. Utilizing ICG’s cloud hosted back-office solutions, these companies and others clients like Boyd Gaming are positioned well for now and into the future with their low cost, high functioning remote operations. So what are some of the solutions ICG offers to help our clients achieve this level of success in such a difficult environment?
- Accounts Payable (AP) Automation
- Vendor Portals (Supplier Portals)
- Vendor Onboarding (Supplier Onboarding)
- PO Dispatch & Update
- Dynamic Discounting
- ERP & Systems Integration
If you are looking to initiate, expand, or streamline your AP or back-office operations contact ICG to setup a call to discuss your situation or schedule a demo for your team to see one or more of our comprehensive back-office solutions. Let ICG with our 30 plus years of experience helping world-class organizations be your partner in in this new remote workforce world.