We asked Salo’s Karen Appleby, senior principal, finance and HR consulting solutions, what she finds most valuable about APQC membership.
About Salo, LLC
Salo drives business outcomes in finance, accounting, and human resources by strategically placing senior-level professionals on a project or interim basis. The company also provides finance and accounting search services.
What tools, expertise, services, or information do you use the most?
APQC is a great resource to support our consulting activities. We use APQC’s Process Classification Framework (PCF)® to help us identify all the elements that need to be considered when assessing a process or organization and find best practices for those processes.
The PCF helps us identify interview questions, frame up and organize the work, and identify best practices.
We sometimes use it for benchmarking as well and use APQC benchmark data to assess process performance for clients.
All of the research and white papers in APQC’s Resource Library are great resources that help us think through client issues and challenges and identify frameworks and best practices as we develop our own methodologies.
APQC’s staff members are a great resource to collaborate with on a challenging benchmarking issue or when you need information about bleeding-edge thinking.
APQC webinars are always valuable and never salesy. Additionally, I’ve attended two of APQC’s Process & Performance Management Conferences, both of which I found to be extremely valuable. Watching the progression of how organizations use process and performance management to move their organizations forward is quite interesting and helps me articulate for clients how they can leverage their own process efforts.
How does APQC membership help you work smarter, faster, and with more confidence?
The value proposition that we offer our clients includes access to best practices and benchmarking metrics. We are not large enough to gather and compile such metrics on our own.
Access to APQC resources drives our clients’ decision to use us over traditional staffing firms, because they get “big firm” capabilities for much lower prices. With APQC we are able to provide process improvement work that we would otherwise not be able to offer.
I almost always reach for APQC resources when I am beginning a client engagement and am in the initial phases of creating a vision for how we are going to proceed with the work. I’m looking for how others have approached similar challenges and also for lists and resources that will ensure my analysis is complete.
Our consultants are encouraged to access APQC and participate, and we include our membership resources in our quarterly training. I also seek to engage my clients in APQC; we talk about how we use APQC resources and sometimes share them directly with clients. For individuals who are looking to learn and grow, the website and conferences are great resources.
We have used APQC’s white papers on process improvement to help our clients see a broader perspective, which changed the nature of the conversation and made it easier to talk about the real truth.