Business Process Reference Models: A guideline for achieving Best Practice?

Filed in archive Best practice on October 5, 2007

Recently, APQC released its new version of the reference model with some updated metrics in supply chain area. This provided the motivation for me to write a little bit about the Business Process Reference Models available in the market.

There are a number non-profit organizations and consulting firms which have developed generic reference models for firms´ business processes. These models have been created as guidelines to achieve best practice and companies can benchmark themselves against them to identify the gaps. Software companies such as SAP also have some reference models but the difference is that their models are based on their own software's modules. It's also really hard to guess the logic behind their reference models (It's clear why: Because the transactions and the logical operations is done by the software).

Among the mentioned categories of organizations, we can refer to the model by American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC). APQC is a non-profit organization based in the U.S. and its goal is to help companies in process and performance improvement.

APQC model has been around for more than 10 years and the organization updates its model every few years according to the new knowledge which has been created in the business world. Overall, I don´t believe if an organization adapts its processes to models such as APQC, the productivity will boost but it will certainly be beneficial.

Later, I´ll try to provide you with an overview of the metric of APQC model in supply chain area.