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Measuring Supply Chain Change Management
In the post-pandemic world, one constant in supply chain has become change. As a result, organizations are investing more time and resources to undertake change management projects within and across supply chain functions.With so many rapid, moving parts, how do organizations decide if a change has…
2024 Predictions for Supply Chain
In recent years, supply chain management (SCM) has come face to face with many challenges—global pandemic shutting down factories, post-pandemic labor shortages and port congestion, intensification of climate change, growing inflation, and geopolitical tensions. These challenges forced…
Last Mile Deliveries are Critical for 2024
Evolving customer behaviors and expectations mean that organizations are facing increasing pressure to change. In our customer service research, APQC found that the COVID-19 pandemic and other disruptions are leading many business-to-business (B2B) customers to develop the same expectations as…
Advanced Supply Chain Analytics Investment Is Worthwhile
In late 2022, APQC carried out a quick poll of 278 manufacturing organizations about the use ofadvanced analytics in supply chain. ‘Advanced analytics’ refers to technology-enabled, complex processes of examining large and varied data sets to uncover key trends, unknown correlations, customer…
Why Procure-to-Pay Governance is a Struggle
In response to increasing global interest in end-to-end processes, APQC has gathered insight into how organizations are governing and managing their procure-to-pay (P2P) processes. This end-to-end process begins with ordering goods and services, then receiving those goods and services, and finally…
How Do You Benchmark a Supply Chain?
You benchmark in supply chain by planning your activities, collecting quantitative and qualitative data from your own and other organizations, analyzing what you collected, and then adapting your findings to take action. To benchmark a supply chain, it’s important to begin with a clear…
It’s Time To Invest In Logistics Employees
After an especially chaotic few years, change and disruption may feel like the only certainties in supply chain. Along with macrotrends like a global pandemic, geopolitical conflict, and a competitive labor market, new and emerging technologies are continuing to transform the ways in which supply…
Service Level Agreement Mistakes
A service level agreement (SLA) defines the specifications, quality, and cost of a good or service being provided by a supplier to a buyer. SLAs help to provide transparency about what the buyer expects from the supplier and protects all parties in the…
Why Your Customer Service KPIs Are Off-Target
Excellence in customer service is critical for retaining customers and maintaining a competitive advantage in the face of changing expectations. Yet APQC finds that many customer service organizations have picked key performance indicators (KPIs) that are inward-looking, lack customer focus, and…
RPA in Supply Chain: Success Starts With Exceptional Governance
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is often positioned as a game-changing technology that helps organizations achieve cost savings, better process performance, and numerous other benefits. But given all the hype around automation, it’s all too easy to underestimate the amount of time, labor, and…