APQC is running a great series of blogs around the process improvement cycle that follows our experiences of the process management cycle.

Although “Improving finance technology is the #1 method that finance professionals identify for making finance processes more effective¹”, it isn’t a panacea and yet this is commonly the starting point for most companies.

While companies engaging in process transformation may be aware of the seven aspects of process management, what APQC calls the “Seven Tenets of Process Management”, the order in which these are executed on is key to the effectiveness of your transformation.

As APQC put it:

“Don’t buy into the hype that a tool can fix your unmanaged processes. Every dollar you spend upfront standardizing your processes and maturing your process management approaches will save you from the nightmare of having to “customize” your new system to accommodate process inconsistency.”

Now, it may seem odd for a software company to be saying that you should hold off buying software but the aim of a project is never to implement software, it’s to ensure success and value. That can only be achieved if the technology underpins the right processes, increasing efficiency, and reducing risks and costs. As the old adage goes, bad data in, bad data out.  To read the complete blog, go to:

https://www.apqc.org/blog/are-you-ready-fix-your-process

¹ PWC, Unlocking Potential: Finance effectiveness benchmark study 2013