SuccessfulWorkplace

Just this week, BP Trends published a case study that is well-worth taking in. ThyssenKrupp Steel USA spent US$6B to create a seamless system for producing rolled steel primarily for the automotive industry. They made very early decisions to make sure their enormous capital investment broke from traditional industry by focusing on business process rather […]

The following is a guest blog by APQC’s Manager of Open Standards Research, John Tesmer. I’m pretty sure that conversations about process have been happening in some form since caveman times. Back then, social BPM was something like grunts about the most effective ways to sneak up on a herd of buffalo. Professionals of recent times standing […]

I hosted a seminar this morning along with Northrop Grumman’s Dennis Pikop on the topic of how to implement and mature business process and other frameworks. We used examples that highlighted three circumstances; withing ‘legacy’ businesses that merge or acquire (Northrop Grumman), from the top downward (UPS) and from the bottom up (ThyssenKrupp Steel USA). […]

I will cohost a webinar with Northrop Grumman on May 31st to discuss and field questions on the APQC Frameworks Study and process maturity. To download the Study with webinar details, click on the image below. From a process perspective, companies grow up and mature the same way humans do. They nearly always start in […]

A guest blog by Tom Molyneux: Last week, Chris Taylor posted a great quick start guide to getting started with BPM. This made me realize that many of the same challenges confront those tackling initial Supply Chain initiatives. Good news…there is an even more-well worn road map that companies can follow to improve their chances of […]

Why this study? APQC knew that their Process Classification Framework (PCF) is widely used in business, fairly evident from 100,000 downloads from their website over twenty years. They were also aware that it has been translated into Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Polish and Portuguese. What they didn’t know, however, were the individual uses of the PCF […]

Cisco, UPS, ThyssenKrupp, Pitney Bowes, Williams Exploration, Sandvik, ING Life…these are enormous enterprises with something fundamental in common…they use frameworks to get real work done. A recent study by the APQC organization focused on those companies to find out how and why. As technical champions, Accenture, Nimbus, and Northrop Grumman provided their BPM expertise to seed the […]

Ah, frameworks…perhaps the most confusing term in BPM. Maybe it is more than one person can tackle in a reasonably short blog. I’ll try. A framework is simply a skeletal structure upon which you build more specific things. Like a house when the wood framework is there but no drywall, electricity, or plumbing. The rooms, […]

Who stocks warehouse nowadays? The real question is, “Who owns warehouses…or sub-assembly plants…or even manufactures products?” Cisco, Intel, Micron and others lead a trend where rapid fluctuations in markets and technologies have led to supply chains that rely on external organizations to create just-in-time supplies of parts and even whole products. What does this mean […]