We asked Atmos’ Bronson Blodgett, director of business process and change management, what he finds most valuable about APQC membership.
About Atmos Energy Corporation
Atmos Energy Corporation, is the country's largest, fully-regulated, natural-gas-only distributor, serving over three million natural gas distribution customers in over 1,400 communities in eight states from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the East to the Rocky Mountains in the West. Atmos Energy also manages company-owned natural gas pipeline and storage assets, including one of the largest intrastate natural gas pipeline systems in Texas.
What tools, expertise, services or information do you use most?
We needed to build out a business process framework to have clear visibility into our processes, their interdependencies, and to avoid unintended consequences of the overall process design.
As we were researching, ‘How do we go about building a business process framework?’, everything led us to APQC’s Process Classification Framework (PCF)®.
As opposed to going through and building out our framework as a large-scale initiative, we built out individual sections of the framework, using the industry-specific PCFs as our foundation. For instance, when Atmos was working towards replacing all our HR management systems with a new system, Workday, we worked with our HR partners prior to switching systems to walk through the human capital management framework to document our current state.
We model this approach as we touch other initiatives across the enterprise; utilizing the PCF to document our current state as a stepping stone to designing our future state.
How does APQC membership help you work smarter, faster, and with more confidence?
We utilize APQC resources to gain buy-in for performance measures and metrics.
APQC’s Resource Library is invaluable to us; it gives us guidance on things to do and not to do.
Additionally, the performance measures and metrics found in the benchmarking tools provide third-party validation for business decisions; helping us gain an audience with business process owners throughout Atmos.