Does your website or e-commerce shop integrate with your back-office systems and processes? If not, you could be facing an unnecessarily high cost of sale. A modern ‘glueware platform’ might just be the answer. It binds your front-of-house into your back-office processes. Read this article to find out more.
The Business Challenge
The global pandemic has caused consumers and business decision makers to move online. Online B2C shopping is growing so fast that the global online shopping market size is predicted to hit 4 trillion in 2020. And, according to the latest B2B research from Gartner, up to 80% of the enterprise buying process now happens online.
Every company needs to be part of that story. But what happens once your new customer portal or website processes a request? In most businesses today, the slick customer facing website doesn’t mean that same level of integration and automation exists in the back office.
Many businesses have added a website or e-commerce shop to their legacy operations. Transitioning from historical business models to e-commerce sites and self-service portals creates disconnects and broken links in the back-office, the consequences of which are:
- Fewer fully-automated processes
- Lots of document and human-in-the-loop driven process steps
- A reliance on the goodwill of staff to ‘keep the wheels from falling off’
- Lots of spreadsheets and SaaS apps
- An over-usage of email as a workflow engine
- High staffing levels
Glue-Ware—A modern solution the connecting front-and-back office
Glue-ware is a cloud-based technology ecosystem for deeply integrating your front-office (i.e. where your customers go to shop and serve themselves), with your back-office (i.e. where requests are processed and fulfilled). It:
- Makes light work of automating machine-to-machine workflows
- Removes re-keying, key-fill tasks, document workflows and human-in-the-loop task.
- Eradicates spreadsheets and ‘SaaS sprawl’ by mimicking the activities of humans and the apps they use
- Monitors key trigger points in your processes to report on the health and performance of critical processes
Glue-ware comes in various forms, from ready-to-deploy integrated platforms to tool-kits provided.
Reasons to Consider Glue-ware
1 .Codeless Integration
Create as many information flows as you like to glue systems together using our codeless data connectors
2. Transparency and Business Insights
Create transparency across your processes with alerts and dashboards to see activity and comparative performances.
3. Machine-to-Machine
Auto-populate back-office systems like your financial or ERP database directly from your website
Summary—Connecting the Dots in your Business Processes
If your business has an e-Commerce shop or point-of-sales front-end that isn’t fully integrated with your financial systems and internal business processes, it’s worth taking a look at the new cloud-based data integration platforms described in this article.
Adopting one integrated middleware platform, instead of stringing together point-to-point data movements, allows businesses to maximize the value of their data; reusing it to ask new questions and offer customers more personalized buying solutions.
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