Introducing External Access: automate collaboration with customers, suppliers, and partners in seconds

Luke Walker
April 23, 2024
4
minutes

Operations leaders have struggled with something for a long time: visibility.

Particularly when it comes to operations processes involving external participants – like customers, suppliers, or partners – it’s very difficult for managers to know the status of a process at any given time, or be able to influence process efficiency.

The problem is, operations processes that involve external parties depend on manual coordination work to carry them out. Delivery drivers, customers, identity-check services, even regulators – in most operations environments, collaborating with these parties requires someone to pick up the phone or write an email. 

“External steps” are vital to an organization’s business processes, but they usually don’t fit into a business’s core software systems, workflow, or process automation tools. 

That’s why we’re excited to introduce External Access: an easy way for external parties to collaborate and execute tasks in Next Matter, as if they were part of your organization. This new feature enables teams to automate process coordination fully end-to-end, and have real-time visibility over their entire organizational flow – no matter who is holding the ball.

‍

Automate external collaboration for end-to-end visibility

Creating and assigning an external step to a retail customer

External steps are included as a part of your Next Matter processes and can be set up in seconds. As a manager, you have full control over the access and visibility permissions that you assign to external parties.  

Once assigned to a process, external steps appear in your dashboard view and are updated in real-time – just like your internal Next Matter processes – so you never need to search for them or ask for status updates.

‍

Coordinate external parties without manual coordination 

A customer-assigned external step for an end-to-end order fulfillment process

With External Access, you can assign external users to any step or series of steps within a Next Matter process. 

Just like process steps for your internal teams, external steps can include important instructions, checklists, data references, and more – whatever external participants need to complete the task, you can provide automatically without any manual coordination.

Setting up and assigning an internal step is easy. 

Just create the process step, define permissions, add the required actions and instructions, and share the unique access link. Your partners, suppliers, or customers will now receive automated notification for each task, and can complete the process step directly in Next Matter – with only the visibility and access permissions you've assigned to them.

‍

An all-in-one operations platform for growing businesses

Birds-eye view of Next Matter at both the step level, and company-wide process overview

High-growth companies are often burdened by high-volume operations. Eventually, they reach a point where their processes can no longer be managed manually –  quality dips, efficiency lags, and teams burn out with the increasing operations volume.

Running operations without excess coordination work is a big challenge on its own. When external stakeholders are added, it becomes a mammoth task. 

Having a scalable operations plan matched with adequate tooling is paramount. This is where Next Matter and external access come in. 

Using Next Matter, operations teams are able to develop their own, all-in-one operating system in no time, and can collaborate with external stakeholders in the same automated and convenient way.

+++

External access provides the final building block for operations teams to achieve end-to-end automation across their operations organization – no matter how many people are involved, where they are located, or what they are doing.

Using Next Matter’s no-code technology, the first end-to-end process can be on autopilot in as little as 60 minutes or less. No additional coordination, no extra headcounts, and no balls dropped. 

Starting today, External Access is available to Next Matter Standard, Professional, and Enterprise customers. To learn more, request a demo with a member of our team today.

Subscribe

Get the latest operations thinking and Next Matter updates once a week.

You've subscribed to the
Next Matter blog.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.