^The APQC Blog

"Painful," "too much effort," "not popular," "a necessary evil"—when employees use these kinds of words to describe a particular process you know that process is broken and needs to be improved. These were the words that APQC employees used to describe APQC's pre-2012 employee performance management process.

How did APQC go from a broken performance management process to one that drives better performance? Elissa Tucker and I share five success factors that helped APQC transform its performance management process, which includes a focus on:

On Wednesday, December 4, APQC and the Edison Awards will be hosting a Webinar presentation by Caterpillar Inc. on the development of an innovative product. Randy Peterson, advanced technology development manager for Caterpillar, will be discussing how the organization developed the game-changing 336E H hybrid excavator.

People are always asking me for a better way to find the APQC knowledge management best practices and guidance they’re looking for. Now there is one! This month we launched APQC’s Interactive Knowledge Management Program Framework, a one-stop shop for the best resources to help you envision, design, implement, and evolve your KM program.

The Process Excellence Network just came out with an article focusing on six process excellence pitfalls to avoid, written by Andrew Spanyi. 

I’m lucky. I get to work with organizations using benchmarking data and best practices to improve. This also affords me the opportunity to talk to individuals just starting their benchmarking journey. Those that are successful, and see improvement, are those that take benchmarking data and information for what it is and ACT on it. Those that don’t move forward get stuck in details.

Finding good data isn’t hard

 “Buy-in” is one of those phrases that we hear all the time. We know it’s important, but given time constraints, heavy workloads, and all those other lovely things that come along with managing projects, it’s easy to put it on the backburner in the name of expediency.

The Houston Chronicle recently named its Top Work Places for 2013. APQC was named 21st out of 140 best small organizations to work for based on the results from employee surveys.

Over the past year, an increasing number of stories about companies moving manufacturing operations back to the United States have been making their way into the news. The idea of creating more well-paying manufacturing jobs in the United States and offering products made in the USA has been building momentum for quite some time, and it seems that companies are taking notice of the benefits of re-shoring by turning the idea of doing so into action.

APQC recently interviewed Nick Katko, Senior Consultant with BMA Inc., about the challenges a CFO faces when a company decides to use a Lean management system.

I have been doing a lot of presentations recently focused on benchmarking, and I see a real shift in the mindset of those using benchmarking to improve the performance of their organization.