In my previous blog post, I talked about random acts of improvement — when change initiatives are undertaken across the organization, with good intentions, but without oversight and alignment. While there may be localized improvement, employees use resources that might have been better applied to a…
Do you have what it takes to succeed in HR not just this year but also in the years to come? While listening to a radio program on job retraining in the United States, I started thinking about the skills and abilities that HR professionals will need to stay relevant and employable into the near-…
Third-party logistics providers (3PLs) have become an integral part of the supply chain industry, and many are expanding the services they provide to shippers. But what services are 3PLs and fourth-party logistics providers (4PLs) really providing? And are 3PLs and 4PLs meeting their customers’…
How can (and should) the finance function think about integrating mobile technology into its business practice? According to the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies, there were almost 6 billion mobile-cellular subscriptions by the end of 2011—that's…
What does it take to be a Lean leader? This article, courtesy of the Process Excellence Network (PEX), suggests five different traits. Lean supervisors are often the key cogs in the process improvement machinery. They sit on the border between management and the coal face, dealing with issues as…
The rise in sophistication among buyers of consulting services isn’t just changing what they’ll buy or what they prioritize when forming and narrowing down short lists (as we’ve reported in this blog the last two months). Today’s clients are radically changing how they expect to pay for consulting…
Learn how your HR function can work smarter by more formally managing HR knowledge. I’ve been writing a lot lately about the shortage of technical skills plaguing organizations in the aerospace, energy, engineering, and many other industries. But, there is another skills shortage that I want to…
Has your organization looked closely at whether offshoring manufacturing is the best choice? During a recent Webinar, Harry Moser of the Reshoring Initiative discussed how organizations can calculate the total cost of ownership for offshoring manufacturing. The Webinar was…
Contrary to popular belief, large, corporate accounting functions have unwittingly retained a lot of waste and inefficiencies in their processes. Despite a decade of cost reduction and process optimization, CFOs and controllers are still not leveraging the cost-reduction power of shared services…
People are always begging me for more SharePoint content, so I’m happy to announce that APQC has published a new SharePoint case study. It focuses on Chevron’s Procurement and Supply Chain Management function, which is building a SharePoint system to house reference information, working documents,…