Your Front Office is the parts of your business dealing with the outside world – customers, vendors, partners.
Your Back Office is the parts of your business dealing only with other functions of the business – order processing, inventory, accounting.
Every business has both a front office and a back office – that’s obvious. What’s less obvious is front and back offices require different approaches to processes and systems.
The back office needs to be focused on the business engine – making things happen, recording and reporting. Processes and systems can be dictated by management. It’s your business – you can decide how it works. You can even choose a software package and adapt the business to use it. Back office is all about “internal” processes
The front office is different -it’s about “external” processes. Here you have to interface with people and systems outside the business, in ways you can’t dictate. Customers, vendors, partners have their own ways of doing things. It’s often their way, or the highway, as far as they’re concerned.
As a general rule, the larger the business the more able it is to dictate how the external interfaces work – try making a bank or telco vendor work your way. These guys can decide exactly how they want to work.
But with smaller businesses its different. They get told how the external interfaces work. They need to be flexible, and they need systems that help them do that, not get in their way.
At the same time this flexibility needs to be part of the management process. Flexible mustn’t mean out of control.
External processes still need planning, scheduling, and execution. When the customer, or vendor, calls you still need to be able to find the information you need, and you need to stay on top of who will do what and when.
Front Office Box is designed to help smaller businesses flex their external processes whilst retaining management control.
We’ve combined standard processes with data integration and management best practice in one package, so you can forget about the complexity of systems, processes and technology.
We look after those, while you get on with the important job – winning and servicing new clients and customers.
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There is obviously a lot to know about his, I think you made some good points. Anyhow keep up the good work.
It’s the old “curse of knowledge” dilemma isn’t it? It’s easy to assume visitors know how to comment or even that commenting is encouraged. Excellent post.
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