We asked ProUnitas’ Adeeb Barqawi, chief executive officer, what he finds most valuable about APQC membership.
About ProUnitas
ProUnitas connects schools with public services, so that teachers can focus on teaching and students can focus on learning. The grant-funded nonprofit facilitates the effective entry, coordination, and implementation of educational, health, and social services for students by providing the infrastructure for schools to partner with existing services.
What tools, expertise, services, or information do you use the most?
Our work is predominantly in process flow and logistics. We were baffled why we were getting the same requests across multiple partners and seeing the same problems, until we realized that it’s really the little pieces. It’s the planning and onboarding all the way to the connection on the campus and all the way to being continuously supported.
Our process standardization work began with APQC’s Process Classification Framework®, then we decided to use MosaiQ® to create a framework that can be easily expanded as the organization grows. We are aiming to have the fully centralized MosaiQ business, from A to Z.
In MosaiQ, for student tracking, we had 17 processes that could be automated.
MosaiQ also helped us look at certain practices and think about what we need to automate. If this was done on paper or Excel, the amount of work to keep it up would be ridiculous.
We rely on the visualization of our processes and the ability to export it. The clarity has been the best kind of thing really for us, in terms of MosaiQ and our ability to start referencing certain processes.
The biggest thing with MosaiQ is sustainability of knowledge. It’s easy to use and export it. You can put it in a visually appealing way, which translates into certain training and feedback approaches.
How does APQC membership help you work smarter, faster, and with more confidence?
We’ve laid the infrastructure and the foundation for individuals to start owning processes. MosaiQ is going to be extremely crucial to our work and to the way we map certain processes and really capture knowledge that has led us to be where we are right now. APQC helped us lay down the framework as a whole company, dig deeper into what we have to become better at, and set ourselves up for replication and scalability.
We might not be the size of Shell Oil and their procurement department. But APQC and MosaiQ got us to the best practices and processes, which have been embedded and iterated. So we can set up our structures in a way that we could grow like Shell or Apple.