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Causes: Business & Industry
Mission: The mission of the american productivity & quality center (apqc) is to educate and to broadly share information with people and organizations around the world to improve productivity and quality by:discovering, researching and understanding emerging and effective methods of both individual and organizational improvement;broadly disseminating our research findings through education, publications, online databases, advisory services and other services that can effectively put the information in the hands of as many individuals as possible;connecting individuals to one another, and with the knowledge, resources and tools they need to successfully manage improvement and change.
Programs: Research projects and benchmarking: apqc conducts research on what drives high performance inside specific processes that are core to organizational viability and found in both public and private sector. This includes providing the methodologies, know how, data, infrastructure, oversight and management. As part of its research program, apqc maintains both qualitative and quantitative repositories, question libraries, and taxonomies that are accessed via apqc. Org by hundreds of thousands of individuals each year. In order to provide valid, reliable and trusted quantitative data, at no additional cost to our members and the public at large, apqc maintains the open standard benchmarking repository. The repository includes a library of industry process frameworks, maturity models and over 2,000 corresponding performance measures that cover activities and tasks performed in across organizations throughout the world. The benchmarking repository houses data provided from over 30,000 organizations making up over 1,300,000 data points from which the benchmarks are derived and then provided back out to the public. Participants in this body of research, complete detailed data collection instruments, data is then validated, analysis is performed and detailed reports are created reflecting the participating entities gaps in performance against the data sets and their unique areas of improvement identified in order to reach optimal performance levels. Reporting includes performance gaps, trends, drivers behind high performance, and best practice insights. Reports are provided through open standards benchmarking at no cost to the user and are valued at over $5,000 per report. In order to provide qualitative best practice information apqc conducts hundreds of research projects annually that are designed to collect best practices and codify performance characteristics of high performing organizations in such a way that they can be shared broadly. The apqc knowledge base includes more than 6,300 content items, including best practice reports, case studies, white papers, specific process trends and corresponding best practices, metrics, tools and templates. Additional dissemination of apqcs content including process classification frameworks, maturity models and benchmarks is done through partnerships with management consulting services and trade and industry associations. Both management consulting firms and associations have a much broader reach; touching more individuals through their work than apqc is capable of achieving. Through these partnerships apqc is able to provide data to millions of individuals, who ultimately apply the data for the purposes of improving in areas such as generating higher productivity, improved quality of products and services and deriving cost savings inside of organizations at no additional cost to the end user. Further dissemination is conducted via the publishing of reports, publications, white papers, speaking engagements and web based events designed to share knowledge broadly.
member services: development and ongoing maintenance of process classification frameworks, research methodologies, infrastructure to support broad data collection and dissemination of benchmarks and best practices used to improve productivity and quality across public and private sectors. Apqc maintains databases and provides easy access to the public of over 2,000 process measures, over 1,3000,000 benchmark data points, 19 industry process classification frameworks and 1 cross industry process classification framework, 46industry maturity models, over 6,000 best practices and numerous methodologies, tools and templates that reflect the needs of public and private sectors throughout the world. Additionally, apqc provides support and customized data and frameworks to meet the needs of our members. As of the end of 2017, there are 100,000 individual registered users of the apqc. Org website consuming over 280,000 content items each year that is valued at approximately $40 million at no additional charge to the user.
education the education group within apqc is involved in transforming education across the united states and throughout the world through addressing waste and inefficiencies throughout the educational system. The group focuses on helping k-12 and higher education leaders, superintendents, principals, faculty and administrators identify and implement best practices that will result in more available resources to dedicate to student achievement. Through the apqcs north star community we teach thousands of educators how to be more efficient and effective. The north star community has helped over 120 districts save over $120m on completed projects. All findings and project exemplars are collected and then stored in a searchable database available to educators throughout the country. Additional dissemination occurs when findings are presented and discussed in detail at education conferences throughout the world. Apqc brings its north star community members together annually to share best practices and learn from one another.