APQC is very fortunate to enjoy the multitude of uses of our Process Classification Framework (PCF). The APQC membership uses the PCF to breakdown siloed organizations, and Professional Services firms use it with their clients to make sure they are talking the same language and drive apples to apples comparisons.

What is the Process Classification Framework?
The PCF is simply a list of activities organizations use to articulate work processes. By using a common language to define all the tasks inside of an organization, the framework standardizes an approach to a number of crucial needs, such as process management, benchmarking, and content management.

Without such a predefined list, multiple business units within a single organization could have duplicative interpretations of even the most basic processes, such as invoicing. Redundancies lead to varying definitions for the underlying measures. This, in turn, can undermine any ability to manage a process consistently across an enterprise.

PCF Implementation Can Vary Depending on Company Needs
Though there are several ways organizations apply the PCF, here are two highly successful examples. Carla Wolfe at Elevations Credit Union spoke during our June webcast, where she outlined her usage of the PCF. APQC has also a collected a few other stories on PCF usage over the past year. More recently, we have also learned that Red Hat will be building the framework into its JBoss BPM Suite 6 Framework.

Elevations Credit Union used the PCF to embed a process-oriented culture within the organization. As a result of its five-year journey from its initial process baseline assessment to establishing a continuous improvement methodology within the organization, Elevations has cited both process and financial improvements.

Red Hat has outlined how its JBoss BPM Suite 6 might be aligned with the PCF if an organization decides to automate its business processes. In this blog post, the author states, “Developed by APQC, the PCF was originally envisioned as a taxonomy of business processes and a common language through which organizations could benchmark their processes. Therefore, it gives organizations the ability to compare themselves. Though benchmarking is the most popular use case, not every organization is so far in the framework implementation. Hence, they may use it just for organizing their structure and functions in a way that manages work in an end-to-end fashion, based upon the cross-referenced process framework or reference model. In the final implementation phase, the PCF becomes an operations manual for the enterprise.” He then continues by providing visual examples of how the software might be mapped to the APQC PCF.

If you have questions about the PCF, how to use the PCF, or how to get started, please leave a comment, and we will be happy to point you in the right direction.