^The APQC Blog

March has been a busy month at APQC. The highlight of the month so far (at least in the supply chain and product development area) has been the release of three new content pieces.

Staying ahead doesn't mean that your competitors can't improve. This week, I was reading Eric Lowitt's latest blog post for the Harvard Business Review: Why Your Company Should Partner with Rivals. So many organizations are afraid to open up and collaborate with competitors because they don't want to lose market share or give another organization undue advantage. What most organizations do not realize is that when an entire industry improves, it reaps the benefits.

The latest update of the Accounts Payable Productivity Index (APPI)* shows that investments in AP process automation can be very worthwhile. The top-performers in the index (organizations with top-quartile scores for both efficiency and effectiveness) are gaining ground in their efforts to get suppliers to submit invoices electronically.  As acquiescence grows, the pace of process innovation picks up, leading to stronger and stronger management of working capital.

These are exciting times for knowledge management: social media has reinvigorated many programs; we know the best practices for developing and implementing a KM strategy; mobile devices have revolutionized the way we work; measurement has gotten more sophisticated. What better time for a leap forward in how we understand KM’s impact on the business?

Today’s consumer is riding the latest technology wave and moving digital purchases and payments to mobile platforms. In contrast, B2B billing and payment processes remain mostly paper-based. That said, we see on the commercial side a strong and growing desire for accounts payable (AP) process automation and (more recently) adoption of accounts receivables (AR) data digitization and straight-through processing. The latter means customers can receive, process, and pay invoices without the touch of human hands.

APQC is finalizing its human capital management (HCM) best practices research agenda for 2012. Take our brief survey to tell us which study topics interest you:  http://www.apqc.org/hcmvoc12.

Topics already under consideration include:

Building a Flexible Work Force—This study would examine how best-practice organizations use different employee arrangements (part time, contract, outsourced, etc.) to modify staffing as business conditions change.

A recent survey conducted by the publishers of Supply Chain Management Review (SCMR) revealed that three-quarters of surveyed companies have either filled supply chain positions within the last year or are planning to fill positions in the coming year. This is positive economic news, but it raises two questions: What types of jobs are companies looking to fill? And what types of skills are needed?

I've never seen an organization market itself as low cost/low quality. That seems like a losing strategy. But can all the organizations that market themselves as low cost/high quality back up that claim? How does an organization know that it's actually achieving higher quality and saving money while costing consumers less? Can an organization really keep its prices low and its quality high? Can leaders track how well they are accomplishing this? Can your organization honestly say that it is the "best value" based on prices, costs, and quality levels?

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of sitting in on the first site visit for APQC’s current Collaborative Benchmarking study, Putting Knowledge in the Flow of Work for Real Results. The site visit featured representatives from a large, global organization talking about how their firm encourages employees to share knowledge and embeds collaboration in processes, workflows, and day-to-day operations.