Back office automation: what role ESM plays in digital business transformation

Every business is faced with a large volume of routine back-office tasks, from human resources to budget and expense management. Many of these processes are still done manually, leading to delays, errors and a lack of transparency between departments. This reduces productivity and increases operational risk.

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is an approach that involves digitalization and standardization of processes across departments: IT, HR, finance, procurement and AWS. ESM improves collaboration between departments, eliminates bottlenecks and makes processes more transparent and efficient, reducing the burden on employees and speeding up task completion.

TAdviser research shows that Russian companies are actively moving towards using ESM to automate their back-office functions. Key figures:

• 59% of companies have already automated their service processes using a unified ESM system, which allows them to significantly reduce operational costs and improve service quality.
• 33% of companies use domestic ESM-solutions, which is associated with the course on import substitution and strengthening of national IT solutions.

The main goals of ESM implementation:

• Simplification and standardization of work processes,
• Improvement of interaction between departments,
• Reduction of response time to requests,
• Savings in the cost of routine operations,
• Enhancement of satisfaction of employees working with internal services.

In this article, we will discuss what business functions can be automated with ESM, how it affects the back office, and why ESM is becoming a key tool for today’s organizations.

What is Enterprise Service Management (ESM)?

ITSM has evolved as a set of practices and processes to effectively manage IT services with a focus on creating business value. Key ITSM principles include customer focus, continuous improvement, and process standardization, which together lead to improved service quality and resource optimization.

Over time, it became apparent that these principles could be successfully applied to other business functions. This led to the development of ESM -an approach that adapts IT service management metrics to different operations within a company. The result is standardized workflows and a centralized management system for all departments, which greatly increases consistency and collaboration.

The main components of an ESM system

• Self-Service Portal: A centralized platform that provides users with the ability to interact with internal company services through a single window. Using the portal, employees can request services, raise incidents, track the status of their requests and find solutions in a knowledge base.
• Service Catalog: A structured list of all available services and services provided by various internal departments of an organization (e.g. IT, HR, Procurement, ACH, etc.). The service catalog not only describes the available services, but also clearly defines (SLA) due dates, cost (if applicable), request processes, responsible parties, and possible interaction scenarios.
• Workflow: a key component of ESM that automates and coordinates the flow of tasks in request processing and service delivery. Includes customizable business processes, approval management, escalation mechanisms, notification system, and intelligent routing of tasks between departments and systems.
• Incident and Request Management System: A tool to record, classify, prioritize, and track incidents and service requests. This system shall provide effective lifecycle management of requests and incidents.
• Service Level Analytics and Management (SLA) tools: comprehensive functionality for analyzing service delivery performance and managing service level agreements. These tools allow you to collect and visualize performance data, track SLA compliance, generate reports and analyze trends.
• Knowledge Base: A centralized repository of useful information, instructions, frequently asked questions (FAQs), problem-solving articles and recommendations. The knowledge base allows users to find answers to their questions on their own, without the need to ask for support, which helps to reduce the load on the support team and speed up the solution of typical problems.

How ESM is transforming back office processes

Back-office processes are the backbone of a company’s stable operations. These tasks support the front office with human resources administration, financial operations, procurement, and contract management. However, these processes are often overburdened with manual labor, disparate systems, and insufficient automation, which reduces productivity and increases costs.

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) addresses these issues by providing a single platform to integrate processes across departments and automate routine tasks. This reduces employee workload, improves the employee experience, and enhances service delivery across the organization.

Main tasks of the back office

Back office processes encompass many tasks such as:

1. HR:

• Human resources management: vacation, sick leave, hiring and firing of employees.
• Maintaining personnel files and processing personnel documents.
• Management of benefits and compensations.

2. Finance:

• Processing of invoices, purchase requests, approval of expenditures.
• Manage financial documentation, reporting and payments.
• Budget control and correlation with real costs.

3. Procurement:

• Ordering equipment and services.
• Control over the fulfillment of contracts with suppliers.
• Maintaining documentation related to procurement and payments.

4. IT service management:

• Management of IT infrastructure, incidents and equipment requests.
• License control and systems access management.

5. Administration and Maintenance Department (AMD):

• Organization of internal economic needs (provision of materials, stationery and equipment).
• Performing housekeeping work (e.g., repairing equipment).

The problem of fragmentation: each department operates in its own way, using separate tools, which leads to inconsistency and lack of process transparency.

For many companies, centralizing back-office operations through ESM has already yielded tangible results. According to TAdviser, companies that have built common service centers (CSCs) have seen up to 30% savings on operating costs due to digitalization and automation. This applies to areas such as handling requests for IT service management, accounting, HR and procurement.

Examples of automating back-office tasks with an ESM system

1. Onboarding and offboarding of employees:

• This is one of the most complex processes, requiring the involvement of multiple departments. ESM automates the sequence of actions, from granting access to onboarding, significantly reducing time and eliminating delays.

2. Requests for vacation, sick leave, business trips:

• Employees submit requests through the self-service portal. ESM automatically submits them for approval and coordinates with HR.

3. Procurement and asset management:

• Equipment purchase request is automatically coordinated with finance and then sent to the purchasing department. The process is controlled by the ESM system, which speeds up execution and minimizes costs.

4. Financial transactions and invoice reconciliation:

• The system can manage invoice processing and approval at all stages, reducing errors and simplifying reconciliation.

5. Support requests (IT, HR):

• Employees submit requests through the portal and the system automatically routes them to the right department where they are processed according to workflow.

Consolidation of processes into a single system with ESM system

• Self-Service Portal: Employees access a catalog of internal services through the portal where they can submit requests for vacation, travel, technical support, etc. Rules and deadlines are defined for each service.
• Workflow: By submitting a request, an employee triggers an automated process. For example, an equipment purchase request goes through IT, finance, and purchasing in a clearly defined sequence, eliminating manual organization.
• Automatic routing: ESM automatically assigns tasks to departments. For example, an onboarding request is divided into parts: IT handles the setup, HR handles the paperwork, and procurement handles the equipment. An employee submits one request, and the system routes it to the right departments.
• Transparency of all stages: ESM allows you to follow the progress of a task in real time, providing transparency. For example, if an employee has submitted a vacation request, they can see what stage it is at.

Data control and process transparency

ESM also provides complete control over processes. It is not just a platform for tasks, but also an operational analytics and reporting tool to track key metrics:

• Delay Notifications: ESM tracks lead times, alerting on delays and potential violations of SLA.
• Single database: Back-office processes are captured in a common database where each request is assigned a unique number, simplifying tracking and processing.
• Reporting: Requests are analyzed by turnaround time, number of requests and other metrics, allowing you to evaluate the performance of departments and individual employees.

Automation through ESM-system allows you to unite disparate back-office processes on one platform. This speeds up information, minimizes errors and improves communication between departments, making ESM a powerful tool for improving operational efficiency.

Successful cases of ESM-system implementation for back-office tasks

MTS Bank

MTS Bank implemented the SimpleOne ESM system. The main objectives of the project are to reduce the time of solving client incidents by 50%, the time of registering mass incidents by 30%, as well as full automation of internal work processes for coordination and solution of routine tasks. In the framework of ESM system implementation we managed to achieve all the tasks set by the bank:

• The platform allowed to automate administrative and business processes, including management of expenses, purchases and stocks. Routine operations for processing service requests, such as ordering office supplies and maintenance, are now faster and error-free.
• At the same time, the platform has made it possible to automate administrative and business processes, including expense management, purchasing and inventory management.
• Acquiring processes, including POS terminal management. The processes of activation, deactivation of terminals and their technical support, as well as transaction monitoring and collection have been automated. This has increased control over the POS terminal infrastructure.
• ESM has automated many internal processes related to processing bill payment requests, adjusting budgets and other operations.

IT company Servionics

Servionica has selected the SimpleOne platform to automate the process of managing corporate services. The first phase of the project successfully automated the recruiting process, which is especially important for a company with more than 2,000 employees:

• A company employee can create a request for a specialist in a couple of clicks and send it for approval.
• Employees of HR-department can also fill out candidate cards in a few clicks and send them for consideration.
• Alerts, as well as simple and clear views of candidate cards, reduce the time it takes to get a response.
• Assigning interviews also happens in the system. The platform ensures that the candidate approval process is maintained internally.

Summary

Automation of back-office processes is becoming a key step towards increasing efficiency and competitiveness of modern companies. ESM implementation helps to optimize a multitude of internal tasks, significantly reducing costs and minimizing the impact of the human factor on routine operations.

The benefits of ESM are especially tangible for companies with developed IT infrastructure and mature management processes, as this solution quickly and effectively increases productivity, improves transparency of operations and enhances the quality of both internal and external services. Such transformations create additional value for employees and customers, contributing to overall business growth.