^The APQC Blog

The first time you try to put together IKEA furniture, it seems simple enough. You have all the parts; the instructions appear well documented and sequential. But more often than not, 20 minutes in you realize you’ve got trouble: boards are upside down, the unfinished edge is showing on one side, and the Allen wrench is causing calluses.

One of the greatest challenges any business faces is staying relevant in a competitive environment. In the past, business leaders were forced to feel out their environments and read the tea leaves of industry and market forces to stay in the game. Today, a new augur for performance and planning exists, predictive business analytics (PBA).

Earlier this week, I received a question through APQC’s Ask Us service from a member who wanted to read more about organizations that have achieved level 4 or 5 on APQC’s Levels of Knowledge Management Maturity scale. I get asked this question at least a few times every month, so I thought it would make sense to share some resources and examples here.

The ongoing Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) corruption investigation took a comical turn on July 20, 2015 when a British comedian began throwing fake money at long time FIFA President Sepp Blatter, requesting a World Cup be held in North Korea.

Earlier this year, APQC fielded a survey focused on current supply chain management priorities and trends. Our results highlighted the continuation of some trends from previous years and revealed some emerging practices. 

Senior business executives need to identify unique opportunities for growth, organize resources for their pursuit, and extract a sound return on investment. Those who succeed are good at understanding that performance can be proactively influenced. They create an effective and cost-efficient predictive analytics process that encompasses a range of techniques dealing with the collection, classification, analysis, and interpretation of data to gain insight, reveal patterns, anomalies, key variables, and relationships.

I was recently able to speak with Dipanjan Das, Vice President of  Order to Cash Practice and Rana Saha, Transformation Leader at Genpact  about how organizations can use predictive analytics to re-design their order management process to match customer needs; resulting in increased revenue, brand visibility, and customer satisfaction.  

Dipanjan and Rana will be speaking on our free webinar on July 30 at 11:00 a.m. CDT:  Using Analytics to Re-envision Order-Management Processes for Improved Customer Loyalty

When your organization faces a skill shortage is recruiting the primary solution? If you answered yes, your organization may be approaching talent scarcity with one hand tied behind its back. 

APQC recently spoke with Mick Simonelli, innovation consultant and former senior executive who built USAA's Innovation Program, and Mike Fitzgerald, innovation leader and senior analyst with Celent, about innovation trends for banks, insurers, and securities firms. They also outlined how these organizations can improve innovation capability.

In the movie Her,  Joaquin Phoenix has a virtual affair with his lovely artificial intelligence (AI) program, voiced seductively by Scarlett Johannsson. 

(Spoiler Alert: This ends badly for the human.)