^The APQC Blog

Turnabout is fair play: Consultants spent decades helping companies squeeze out every bit of margin across supply chains and within their internal operations. Now, consultants are the vendors feeling the vice clamps.

The last decade was bookended by two downturns, both of which led consultants to lower their average hourly rate. And those rates have been slow to climb as the steady migration of consultants into industry has turned clients into smarter buyers of consulting.

Results from the 2012 Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) Fraud and Control Survey conducted in January 2012 have been recently published. In its eighth year, the AFP Fraud and Control Survey highlights the situation, methods, and frequency in which the majority of organizations fall victim to payment fraud.

March has been a busy month at APQC. The highlight of the month so far (at least in the supply chain and product development area) has been the release of three new content pieces.

Staying ahead doesn't mean that your competitors can't improve. This week, I was reading Eric Lowitt's latest blog post for the Harvard Business Review: Why Your Company Should Partner with Rivals. So many organizations are afraid to open up and collaborate with competitors because they don't want to lose market share or give another organization undue advantage. What most organizations do not realize is that when an entire industry improves, it reaps the benefits.

The latest update of the Accounts Payable Productivity Index (APPI)* shows that investments in AP process automation can be very worthwhile. The top-performers in the index (organizations with top-quartile scores for both efficiency and effectiveness) are gaining ground in their efforts to get suppliers to submit invoices electronically.  As acquiescence grows, the pace of process innovation picks up, leading to stronger and stronger management of working capital.

These are exciting times for knowledge management: social media has reinvigorated many programs; we know the best practices for developing and implementing a KM strategy; mobile devices have revolutionized the way we work; measurement has gotten more sophisticated. What better time for a leap forward in how we understand KM’s impact on the business?

Today’s consumer is riding the latest technology wave and moving digital purchases and payments to mobile platforms. In contrast, B2B billing and payment processes remain mostly paper-based. That said, we see on the commercial side a strong and growing desire for accounts payable (AP) process automation and (more recently) adoption of accounts receivables (AR) data digitization and straight-through processing. The latter means customers can receive, process, and pay invoices without the touch of human hands.

APQC is finalizing its human capital management (HCM) best practices research agenda for 2012. Take our brief survey to tell us which study topics interest you:  http://www.apqc.org/hcmvoc12.

Topics already under consideration include:

Building a Flexible Work Force—This study would examine how best-practice organizations use different employee arrangements (part time, contract, outsourced, etc.) to modify staffing as business conditions change.

A recent survey conducted by the publishers of Supply Chain Management Review (SCMR) revealed that three-quarters of surveyed companies have either filled supply chain positions within the last year or are planning to fill positions in the coming year. This is positive economic news, but it raises two questions: What types of jobs are companies looking to fill? And what types of skills are needed?