^The APQC Blog

APQC, in conjunction with EPM Channel, conducted a survey this summer to better understand trends in finance talent development. When asked, “what one change would make the most difference to your finance organization and its ability to add value to the enterprise?” 26 percent of survey participants responded with a desire for better technology and information management tools. The second most popular responses (tied at 20 percent) were to change or enhance the role of finance and to increase finance staff.

Here at APQC, we publish a lot of content exclusively for our members, but we also make our research available to the broader public. So, of the hundreds of content pieces publicly available in our Knowledge Base, which are downloaded most often? Below is a top 10 list of some of our most popular articles, white papers, and assessments.

According to the American Society of Quality (ASQ), the cost of quality is the price of not creating a product or service. In other words, the calculation measures the waste or losses associated with producing a poor quality product. Costs rise when rework, retesting, or rebuilding happens, as the extra time spent fixing a product or service increases the associated costs.  

of Our Latest Performance-Improving Resources for HR.

On Tuesday, August 28 at 10:30 a.m. CDT, join me for a complimentary, guided tour of APQC’s most recent human capital management (HCM) content.

Hear where you can find HR metrics including:

Do you want to expand your organization’s idea-generating capacity? APQC’s upcoming Best Practices Study, Enhancing Idea Generation Through Collaboration, aims to look at how organizations use outside sources to bring additional value inside.

The reality is that more talent exists outside your organization’s walls than inside. This is true regardless of what industry you are in, how large your enterprise is, or how experienced and educated your employees are. 

In this month’s APQC FM webinar, Mary Driscoll, senior research fellow, and Irene Ngan, knowledge specialist, presented highlights of the newest financial management content now in the knowledge base. Find out what new FM content has been published since the beginning of 2012 here.

I don’t know about your organization, but at APQC, we’re already thinking about planning and budgeting for 2013. If you’re looking to design a new knowledge management budget for next year, I recommend checking out our article Budgeting for Knowledge Management: How to Plan for and Prioritize Investments. The article talks about what it costs to launch and run an effective KM program and provides examples of funding models.

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 more important need, or worse yet, the change can break another part of the organization, minimizing the gains or having an overall negative effect.

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-term future.

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’ needs?