APQC’s research team applies proven research methods to develop solutions, strategies, and tools to solve your real business problems. Working alone and in partnership with member organizations and industry experts, we discover and capture the key processes and enablers behind successful practices. We then disseminate that knowledge to other organizations to help you meet today’s challenges while helping you transform your organization for future success and competitive advantage. Explore the findings and results from our research in our vast Resource Library, and check out our upcoming and past research below.
Tell us about your role as we look to identify the characteristics of KM professionals in our latest research project.
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Contact APQCAccounts Receivable management is a crucial aspect of financial operations within businesses, representing the money owed to a company by its customers for goods or services delivered but not yet paid for. Effective accounts receivable management ensures that businesses maintain a healthy cash flow, reduce the risk of bad debts, and optimize working capital.
The value of accounts payable (AP) research and benchmarking to companies is multifaceted, offering insights that can significantly enhance operational efficiency, financial management, and strategic positioning. Thus, APQC is conducting new research to understand the current state of broad accounts payable processes. By understanding and applying industry best practices, companies can streamline their AP processes, mitigate risks, and position themselves for sustainable growth.
APQC partners with ScottMadden to conduct a bi-annual Finance Shard Service Benchmarking Study that collects measures and best practices concerning: • Characteristics of top-performing SSOs • Ways automation and GenAI are changing the traditional FM SSO • Trends with governance, globalization, and hybrid work models
As part of the 2025 Financial Management Priorities and Challenges research, APQC surveyed finance professionals from various industries, geographies, and organizational sizes. Surveyed topics include trends and challenges in digital transformation, cash flow management, and finance risk management.
A Delegation of Authority (DOA) policy is a formal document that outlines the decision-making powers and responsibilities delegated to various levels of management within an organization. This policy ensures that decisions are made efficiently and by the appropriate individuals, promoting accountability and operational effectiveness. This research project aims to analyze and evaluate the delegation of authority process within an organization. This involves understanding how decision-making powers are distributed across various levels of the organization, identifying the key principles and policies guiding delegation, and accessing the effectiveness and efficiency of the delegation framework.
Advances in technology has created an increasing amount of interest in integrating Artificial Intelligence into the finance function. APQC has conducted research to examine how organizations are implementing AI and what results they are seeing. Topics will include how AI changes end-to-end processes, FTE count and utilization, and the effectiveness of the finance function.
These toolkit collections provide guidance, tools, and downloadable templates to help organizations carry-out workforce planning and HR transformation.
Companies are increasing their focus on improving and expanding their DEI efforts across the organization. Using a survey and case studies, this research examined common DEI practices and challenges and identified key requirements for supporting DEI in spirit and practice. Using the research findings, organizations will be able to benchmark their DEI practices and progress against peer and best-in-class organizations.
APQC’s Current State of Learning and Development Survey gathered L&D practice and performance data from 300 L&D leaders. The survey collected benchmarks related to the drivers of learning needs in organizations today, current levels of L&D staffing and spending, and commonly used L&D methods and technologies. The findings also reveal how organizations are measuring learning and the extent to which today's L&D functions are delivering the learning their organizations need.
Today’s technology and the increasing adoption of AI in business has created a catalyst for evolving the HR function and how it’s structured and operates. However, the rapid need to adopt has left a lot of questions for organizations to figure out, including how many HR function FTEs they need, how much the HR function cost, and what do the new processes look like with the adoption of new technologies.
APQC research will seek to understand current HR practices that drive better HR function performance. These practices include HR strategy, structure, staffing, spending, technology, and processes. The research findings will allow organizations to benchmark themselves against top performing HR functions.
Organizations today are experiencing higher than normal turnover rates and are faced with onboarding new employees more frequently. However, HR leaders are also struggling with finding the most effective onboarding plans to get the new hires to full productivity quickly in the most effective and efficient way possible. What is today’s workforce looking for when they are onboarded?
APQC research will survey new employees on their onboarding experience in order to identify what onboarding practices were effective, most desired, and led to individual success within the organization. HR leaders can use the research findings to evaluate their own onboarding process and make adjustments to fit the needs of today’s workforce.
Engage with our human capital management audience through podcasts, webinars, case studies, and interviews!
Some sample topics include:
* People challenges
* HR process excellence
* Best practices in upskilling and reskilling employees
* HR as a strategic business partner
* Benchmarking HCM
In 2025, knowledge management (KM) remained a focal point for many organizations, driven by the ongoing evolution of Generative AI. This advancement has introduced new opportunities and investments in both technological and cultural transformation for managing an organization’s most critical knowledge, while also presenting new and ongoing challenges. This research serves as a “pulse check” on the current state of KM and explores its future trajectory. APQC examines the purpose and role of KM within organizations, the influence of business and societal trends on KM, the significance and impact of emerging technologies, and the future direction of the KM discipline and the requirements to achieve it.
KM programs continue to use APQC’s flagship KM benchmarking survey to level-set and evaluate their KM programs. In 2025, APQC expanded and enhanced this survey in response to shifts in enterprise knowledge needs, workforce structure, and technology capabilities. The current assessment provides today’s KM programs with the data and insights they need to make smart decisions about how KM should be staffed and structured, the resources KM needs and how they should be allocated, the tools and approaches needed to enable the flow of knowledge, how success should be measured, and what kind of results to expect. This collection highlights results from the research, including benchmarking data and related insights.
This research explores the role of KM teams in driving digital transformation and the effectiveness of various technologies, such as virtual collaboration, machine learning, and AI, in knowledge management. The research aims to provide insights into current trends, deployment strategies, and the impact of technology on knowledge management capabilities.
APQC's Knowledge Management Essentials series explores key KM topics and offers introductory content, best practices, and tools and templates. The research collections provide a wealth of information about knowledge management techniques and approaches, along with practical tips for getting started and staying updated on new resources.
The content within the collection will teach you about key performance indicators (KPIs) for information technology, as well as proven performance improvement drivers and best practices. This content is derived from an analysis of APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking® in Information Technology Organization Performance assessment and is a collection of benchmarks and metrics, as well as best practices and business drivers.
This new research will serve as a way to assess the role of KM professionals, including their demographics, education, experience and skillsets, in the future. It additionally seeks to understand the role of the experts within organizations as the impetus for effective knowledge transfer and the implementation and adoption of KM approaches overall.
The variety of KM approaches can be challenging for KM teams to determine which approach is right for them. As the ongoing evolution of Generative AI continues to evolve, the technology that supports various approaches will also evolve. This updated research will serve as a way to assess the current state of KM approaches and validate foundational practices while gaining new insights into implementation strategies and technology practices of today’s KM teams.
Engage with our knowledge management audience through webinars, case studies, and interviews!
Some sample topics include:
People of Knowledge Management
KM Accelerators
KM Essentials
Future of KM Expertise
KM Benchmarks & Metrics
At the close of 2024, APQC's process and performance management group conducted its annual survey to understand the common challenges and priorities of practitioners in 2025. The survey looked at the top five priorities and challenges in key process and performance topics like business process management, continuous improvement, strategic planning, and data and measurement. It also explores potential changes in the process management discipline, how organizations utilize operational key performance indicators (KPIs), and their thoughts on design thinking and digital transformation.
The goal of process management is to improve performance. Whether the emphasis is customer retention, cycle time, employee satisfaction, efficiency, business growth, productivity, or any other goal, organizations implement process management to improve something. Without an overarching management strategy, improvements often breed unintended consequences that harm other parts of the organization. APQC conducted a survey to understand process improvement programs in key areas such as identification of which processes to improve, prioritizing and selecting which process improvement projects are worth employees’ time, and the sustainability of process improvement projects. This collection contains the survey findings and insights for organizations to benchmark in these key areas.
APQC conducted a survey to understand process management program practices, strategies, and resources. The survey report uses APQC’s Seven Tenets of Process Management as a structure for assessing key areas such as governance, strategy, change, improvement, measurement, tools, and models.
In February of 2024, APQC conducted a survey to understand how digital tools and technologies impact process and performance management (PPM) professionals and the organizations they support. This research explores the role of digital technology in the process and performance space categorized by organizational size based on revenue, including defining trends in digital and technology for the PPM space, defining what organizations see as future needs and approaches for digital and technology in the PPM area, and identifying leading PPM digital technologies and tools.
Prepared using data from APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking® in Sales and Marketing and APQC’s Benchmarks on Demand portal, these collections highlight sales, marketing, and customer service key performance indicators (KPI) benchmarks and practices for organizations across industries.
This bi-annual project uses a survey to explore how organizations use process frameworks, considerations for implementation, and provides guidance on overcoming the challenges of adoption.
In its 2025 Supply Chain Management Priorities and Challenges research, APQC asked supply chain professionals across numerous industries about their expectations and trends for the year ahead. Some topics include operational and process innovation, logistics, procurement, sourcing, and supply chain planning. Learn more about how well supply chains performed in 2024, changes and trends impacting supply chains, the biggest obstacles to improving supply chains, and focus areas and priorities for supply chains in 2025.
This 2024 update of APQC’s Sourcing and Procurement Blueprint for Success serves as a guide for how procurement professionals can achieve best-practice performance. The report provides a framework for optimizing the core processes comprising sourcing and procurement as well as performance drivers to achieve success.
Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) factors are used to measure sustainability and organizational impact. ESG reporting is an essential part of providing updates to stakeholders of all kinds, including investors, regulatory agencies, customers, and employees. This collection provides insights into each of the ESG factors, the challenges in ESG reporting, the number of tracked metrics, the types of reporting standards and frameworks used, and more.
APQC conducts periodic quick polls in supply chain to learn about the latest trends in emerging technologies and key practices. This research from APQC gathered insights from supply chain professionals on a variety of topics.
As part of ongoing research in supply chain, APQC gathered information on the latest artificial intelligence (AI) trends, technology strategy, and decision making across different areas in supply chain.
Disruption is no longer a one-off event, and extreme volatility is the new global reality. This research will explore a range of resilience capabilities needed across the supply chain to thrive as things change.
This research will examine cybersecurity operations (information technology and operational technology systems). Cybersecurity is vital to supply chain as it guards against risks related to the use of information and communications technologies, which could include both risks related to human error as well as intentional/malicious attacks, whether generated by internal or external parties (nation states, terrorists, industrial competitors, organized crime, hacktivists or lone hackers/criminals).
If you have a story to tell about how your organization has overcome common supply chain challenges, implemented new supply chain programs, or built a better mousetrap in supply chain, we (and our audience) would love to hear about it!
APQC’s sponsored research program is a fee-based opportunity for professional services firms, associations, and technology providers to sponsor and participate in APQC research or data collection opportunities. Promote your brand, develop thought leadership, and access exclusive research through this program.
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