^The APQC Blog

APQC’s 18th Annual Knowledge Management (KM) Conference was a huge success. As a new member to our KM team, it was great for me to meet many of the attendees and conference speakers.

We had a lot of great organizations presenting on the new and exciting things that are happening in KM. Obviously, it’s hard to pick and choose what breakout sessions to attend. I know I had that problem. Luckily, we now have overviews of the breakout sessions available in APQC’s Knowledge Base. If you missed out on a session, take a read and see what you missed.

APQC's Process Classification FrameworkSM (PCF) is a useful tool that outlines the most common processes practiced in organization, categorizes them, and then aligns them according to a hierarchical numbering system. Yet many people feel that isn’t quite deep enough. Many users contact APQC to ask, “What do you mean by this process?” The PCF is meant to a high-level snapshot of an organization’s processes, as that allows users to tailor it to their unique needs.

Performance management. Performance appraisals.  Year-end reviews and evaluations. Goals. Balanced scorecards.

Inventory management is important to many organizations, and finding new ways to improve inventory accuracy can save an organization a lot of money over time. This post will look at data for inventory accuracy. The data presented is taken from APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking in logistics, and will provide you with an understanding of how your organization compares to APQC’s benchmarks. 

Smoke signals, carrier pigeons, Dilbert-style meetings, web meetings, virtual worlds, mobile, face-to-face meetings. It would seem that what once was old is new again. More precisely, I should say that the desire to connect with kindred spirits seems never to have waned. What do I base this upon? Recently, a few clients of mine expressed a desire to meet with others interested in KM, from other organizations, in their geographic area. So in other words, in this always-on always-connected world, they still want to sit and chat with others in person—go figure!

Change is hard…and most people don’t like change.  So, APQC, being APQC, is going to look at how we can make process change stick.  Later on this year, we will be launching a study currently titled, “Making Process Change Management Stick.”  We want to examine and share with others how leading organizations are making process management changes permanent within their company.

HR benchmarking metrics are growing in popularity, but they’re typically expensive and difficult to get. You can gain a lot of insight from this information though. Benchmarking helps organizations understand where they stand compared to others in their industry. This information can allow them to improve, develop, and make key decisions. For example, benchmarking metrics can show areas of weakness; using this insight, businesses can figure out what to do to progress.

Automation of invoice processing, especially when electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) via EDI—a supplier portal—or network is involved, can save an organization 60 to 80 percent of its AP processing costs compared to its paper-laden predecessor.

As many of you know, APQC held its 18^th (!!) Annual Knowledge Management Conference in Houston last week. This is my sixth conference, and it’s always one of my favorite weeks of the year—getting to hear what’s going on in people’s KM programs, what challenges they’re facing, and all the success they’ve achieved.

In 2005, Antony Savvas wrote a blog post called Resistance to Business Process Management: Gaining Buy-In. He discussed in his ComputerWeekly.com article that human nature plays a critical part in successfully implementing business process management (BPM).