ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Competitive Edge Through Lively Benchmarking/Sharing
Lea Tonkin, editor in chief
Looking for a competitive edge in harsh global markets? To start the new year with fresh data and helpful connections that can strengthen your position, participate in the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME)/APQC Benchmarking Community of Practice (CoP). Through timely, free webinar presentations, inquiries to fellow CoP members, access to the APQC Open Standard Database and CoP Query Service, and learnings shared by AME manufacturing excellence award recipients, you will gain knowledge and understanding that you can use in planning strategies for improving your organization’s performance.
Monthly webinar topics range from lean accounting and lean administrative improvements to enterprise transformation and sustainable practices. Recipients of AME’s manufacturing excellence awards will be presenters during 2012. CoP members share information about health care and educational excellence, in addition to manufacturing “lessons learned.”
Key benefits CoP members will receive in 2012, according to Bill Baker of Speed To Excellence and CoP co-founder:
- Sharing/gaining quick benchmarking information/data from trusted colleagues; many world-class organizations use benchmarking as a systematic, key element in their quest for operational performance improvements.
- The ability to pose questions about challenges or problems to others in the CoP; membership includes more than 930 individuals representing 425 companies. Members usually receive responses to their inquiries within a week, many within one day.
- Tapping into the APQC Open Standard database history for instant access to data on performance metrics, etc.
- Learning real-time from AME award recipients and other prime benchmark organizations during CoP webinars and the AME annual conference CoP special interest session.
- Recognition of your achievements and feedback from CoP members.
To join the CoP or learn about opportunities for presenting/facilitating a webinar session, contact Susan Chandler (manager of the Benchmarking CoP website) at schandler@ame.org or Ron Webb of APQC rwebb@apqc.org. Ask for the link to the Open Standard Database, so you will be knowledgeable about available benchmarking data. Evaluate your company priorities and strategic continuous improvement processes to gain the most from your participation in the CoP. Then experience “achieving enterprise excellence through shared learning” by joining fellow practitioners in the CoP activities and present your best practices when you are ready.
