Top finance functions are embarking on substantive changes to their processes and their organizational role. APQC conducted a case study research project throughout 2018 seeking best practices from organizations transforming their finance and accounting functions, and found some common themes…

Many of you may have heard me say, "you have to know where you have been, to know where you are going." Not only does this give you the foundation to know what you need to plan for, but frankly, it's also always good policy to acknowledge the past before moving on. So that's what I wanted to…

APQC is engaged in current and ongoing research on planning, budgeting, and forecasting through our Open Standards Benchmarking Survey on Planning and Management Accounting. As part of our research, we look at both key performance indicators, as well as practices data, about these processes…

Robotic process automation (RPA) has quickly become inevitable. In March of 2018, APQC interviewed Tilak Banerjee, a director at Dell-EMC, on RPA: “When we started in 2015, RPA was more or less a new concept in the shared services industry,” said Banerjee. “Right now, a lot of companies I talk to…

Invoicing and accounts receivable (AR) are core finance transactional processes that lie at the heart of an organization’s liquidity and working capital management. These two processes are flip sides of the same coin, with invoicing encompassing the activities involved in billing customers for…

In October, process and performance management professionals from around the globe came together in Houston for APQC’s Annual Process and Performance Management Conference. This year’s event—titled Evolving for the Digital Age—was a recognition of the shifts in leaderships’ expectations and…

I recently spoke with Evelyn Brisibe, senior performance excellence advisor at AltaLink to discuss change management and its ability to help organizations introduce, implement, and sustain a process management framework and mindset. How do you define a process management mindset? A process…

I, along with my colleague Lauren Trees, recently interviewed 21 organizations applying artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) internally and found that the organizations that had made the most progress, had the most experimentation, and were having the most successful AI…

There is an AI/automation arms race underway between the big players—IBM, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook – and knowledge management is the beneficiary.  Turns out, KM tasks such as content management, tagging, search, and expertise location are good targets for AI and might really…

Chances are, you’re already familiar with the basic concept of Agile project management: a small team works in time-boxed sprints, frequently demoing features and integrating customer feedback, to iteratively deliver a customer-centric end result. Since its origins in software development…