^The APQC Blog

Here at APQC we often get requests for new research on emerging, developing, or trending topics. As we get these requests in supply chain management, we work them into our planned research. Sometimes, the problem is, that it takes months (or more) before we can take a request, conduct the research, analyze it, and get it out the door. To help speed up this process APQC has partnered with Supply Chain Management Review to come up with monthly topics in supply chain management that we can establish and take to market what we find in a short cycle time.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is undoubtedly a topic of high interest to most organizations. Its potential, combined with the growing accessibility and maturity of RPA technologies, is positioning RPA as a key tool in the organizational toolbox. Furthermore, process automation is at the heart of most organizations’ digital transformation—to achieve improved efficiency and reduce costs. But beyond these more tangible drivers lurks another motivating factor: the hype around process automation.

At the beginning of the year we surveyed a group of 260 finance professionals from across industries and regions to find out what their priorities were for 2018. The results were at once simple and complex.  The top two finance function priorities for 2018 were:

CFO Magazine’s May Metric of the Month column (authored by my colleague, Perry D. Wiggins) discusses Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) with an excellent analogy to scuba diving. I highly recommend that column as Perry provides many useful ideas you can immediately use to improve DSO.

A core finance process, accounts payable (AP) involves all of the essential activities of an organization to pay its suppliers. As one of the primary organizational candidates for early automation, AP is ripe for innovation through process improvement and automation. These improvements can liberate AP professionals from transactional tasks in order to best make use of their valuable time.

Competitiveness is ingrained in human nature. We like feedback on our own performance, but we also like to peek over the fence to see what others are doing—and if they’re doing it better than we are. The same is true in knowledge management. If you’re involved in a KM program, you’re probably curious how your results compare to others, especially organizations that look like yours or have similar knowledge-related goals.

An enterprise process framework provides system-wide insight and transparency into challenging and complex situations very quickly. It is home to transparent working processes with linked inputs and outputs providing an incredibly rich platform for holistic improvement.

Enterprise Process Framework Overview

The Basics

The theme of APQC’s 2018 Knowledge Management Conference—Digital, Smart, and Engaging—was a nod to both the technology shifts influencing the KM space and the continuing need to think about KM through a human lens and motivate employees to document, share, and reuse knowledge. The balance between people, process, and technology has always been a tricky tightrope in KM, and many organizations are working to understand how that balance is changing in light of new tools and capabilities.

Key Takeaways from the Conference

Much press attention has been given to the experiences of women working in technology companies. Patricia Salgado Ph.D., a fellow at the Institute for Social Innovation at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara California, has uniquely focused on the men working in the tech industry, conducting research into their experiences of gender diversity.

Last September I posted a blog: “What is Blockchain?” At that time, only 6 percent of people who took our poll on blockchain rated themselves as extremely familiar with it. Since then, the global conversation about this distributed ledger technology has evolved, and many organizations have begun conducting pilot projects using blockchain. In fact, almost every APQC member I talk to is engaged in some form of digital transformation, with blockchain increasingly being mentioned.