^The APQC Blog

Michael Kirsten, a B2B content strategist of Kelly Services, in collaboration with APQC discussed the survey results of the Kelly Global Workforce Index-The Leadership Disconnect on Wednesday, May 8^th.

APQC has updated its popular report on procurement benchmarks and improved procurement processes. APQC’s Blueprint for Success: Procurement (Second Edition) now features new company examples and updated data on procurement performance metrics.

Some of the measures highlighted in the report are:

In the ever-tightening market for skilled finance professionals, organizations have to compete for skillful, experienced candidates. With little name recognition and a lack of branding possessed by companies like IBM, smaller finance organizations are left behind in the competition for the attraction and retention of these employees. Such recruiting challenges have been met with an unexpected solution: temporary workers.

One of the things I like to mention to those trying to make SharePoint work for them is to understand this: A powerful feature of SharePoint is its flexibility; the biggest drawback of SharePoint is its flexibility. So it’s no wonder that so many people have found the ubiquity of SharePoint in their organizations to resemble the map location marked, “Hic sunt dracones.” Actually, depending upon an organization’s resources, SharePoint can be Jekyll or Hyde. Those with skilled developers can make rather elegant SharePoint implementations.

Organizations around the world leverage APQC’s process classification framework (PCF) to efficiently define processes, benchmark performance, and catalog and organize knowledge and content. Organizations depend on APQC to consistently define and manage the PCF in order to ensure the long-term value of their investment in adopting the framework. But how does it work?

Benchmarking your organization against others on performance metrics can help your organization improve on specific business processes and activities.

APQC conducted both in-person and virtual site visits in March and early April for the Best Practices Study, Open Innovation: Enhancing Idea Generation Through Collaboration.

Site visits have taken place for the following five best-practice organizations:

Some companies’ accounts payable (AP) functions spend 30 percent more than necessary on labor costs. That’s because they are drowning in paper invoices that must be processed by hand. Typically, documents have to be fed into a scanner that feeds into a software program that recognizes and sorts data. Short of that, information must be manually keyed into a system.

Your organization has made progress with its improvement efforts. It has met its stated performance goals. There are no significant issues standing in the way of meeting future improvement objectives. Under that scenario, you may think all is right with the world when it comes to your business.

I challenge you to rethink that assumption.

When I talk to our members about their knowledge management challenges, change management is always near the top of the list. It’s one thing to create a KM strategy and select knowledge-sharing and collaboration approaches you want to implement, but it’s another to actually roll out the new processes and get employees to embrace them.