March has been a busy month at APQC. The highlight of the month so far (at least in the supply chain and product development area) has been the release of three new content pieces.
- Improving the Flow of Knowledge in Product Development (a best practices report)
- Supplier Category Management: Driving Value Through the Procurement Organization (a best practices report)
- APQC’s Logistics Tune-Up Diagnostic.
Improving the Flow of Knowledge in Product Development combines APQC’s product development research with our expertise in the knowledge management area. The report takes on a complex question within product development: How do you transfer best practices and lessons learned from project to project, from team to team, and from person to person?
The report highlights 16 best practices organizations can use to tackle this problem, and it features case studies of five best-practice organizations.
Supplier Category Management: Driving Value Through the Procurement Organization explores how an organization’s procurement function can go beyond focusing on low-cost sourcing to provide real value to the enterprise. By emphasizing purchasing efforts in categories that are critical to the organization, the procurement function can deliver results. This report discusses the 14 best practices found by APQC’s study team and includes case studies of three best-practice organizations.
Last but not least is APQC’s Logistics Tune-Up Diagnostic, which we created in response to the popularity of our Procurement Tune-Up Diagnostic. The Logistics Tune-Up provides data and descriptions of the following key logistics metrics.
- Total cost of the process Plan inbound material flow per $1,000 revenue
- Total cost of the process Operate warehousing per $1,000 revenue
- Total cost of the process Operate outbound transportation per $1,000 revenue
- Pick-to-ship cycle time in hours
- Number of full-time equivalent employees (FTEs) in the logistics function per $1 billion revenue
With our Interactive Logistics Tune-Up Diagnostic, you can enter your company’s performance on the five metrics and quickly see where your organization can improve.
As always, we have more supply chain and product development content in the works. So stay tuned!