^The APQC Blog

"I'm gonna have to science the ##$^ out of this!"

So says Mark Watney, lead character in the best-selling book and soon to be released movie The Martian starring Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain. Faced with death, Watney had compelling motivation to become an expert in survival on Mars.

I was curious about how a non-engineer learned enough to write such an accurate book. (According to NASA; I wouldn’t know.)  

On August 26, 2015, APQC conducted a webinar on benchmarking shared services centers (SSC).  The webinar highlighted characteristics that make SSCs advantageous to organizations that utilize them and how benchmarking can be used to point out opportunities for process improvement at SSCs.

APQC recently held a webinar to discuss how companies reimage their order management processes to increase revenue, brand visibility, and customer satisfaction. Genpact’s Dipanjan Das and Rana Saha collectively responded to the follow-up questions from the webinar:

How do we improve the customer experience through the order management process?

I was recently able to speak with Tim Allen, vice president at Project Consulting Group (PCG) about the common pitfalls of implementing ERP, CRM, and BI systems.  Often these implementations are driven by rapid execution strategies designed to save time and money, with little or no consideration for the correct alignment of the technology with the company’s mission critical process. In many cases, the company is not able to garner true ROI from the software investment and employees actually end up using only a small portion of the software functionality.

A majority of business decision makers want their organizations to do more to embrace modern technologies and new channels of customer engagement and digital experience. That’s one of the key findings presented by the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network in its report Accelerating Business Transformation Through IT Innovation: Getting the Business Leader Take on the IT Change Mandate.

Today’s sourcing and procurement function has the ability to be so much more than just the buying arm of the enterprise, focused only on getting the lowest cost. Shifting the focus to what the business needs to accomplish its goals can enable procurement to take into account elements such as supplier quality and reliability. The procurement playing field today requires knowing when and how to apply collaborative relationships in which suppliers are motivated to drive transformation and innovation with purposeful investments designed to create value.

Greetings and salutations cherished employee,

This is an email spoofing scam masquerading as an executive or trusted vendor. It goes sort of like this:  I am travelling overseas visiting our facilities in Eastern Europe and need funds to confirm our commitment to a building expansion. Please wire 20K Euros to the account below and rest assured you are doing your job well. Your hard work is appreciated.

Anyone following APQC’s recent content management research knows that an excellent enterprise search capability—one that surfaces the best content, conversations, and experts for a given query—is essential for organizations that want to maximize the value of their knowledge assets.  In this video Diane Berry, senior vice president of market strategy at Coveo, explains how enterprise search can improve a KM program and the challenge of getting it right.