FOREWORD
 The
Asian Productivity Organization (APO), with its
aim of enhancing the productivity and competitiveness
of organizations located in the Asia-Pacific region,
has established the APO Best Practice Network
(APO BPN). The network seeks to generate, share,
and transfer knowledge on best practices that
will enable organizations in member countries
to improve their performance. The creation of
the APO BPN was inspired by the interest and commitment
of members including Japan, the Republic of Korea,
the Republic of China, Singapore, Malaysia, the
Philippines, and India.
Knowledge of best practices provides a competitive
advantage for organizations in the knowledge-based
economy. Whether in manufacturing or services,
private or public, organizations must benchmark
themselves against the best standards or practices
worldwide to achieve competitive advantage and
business excellence. The knowledge gained can
also be used to adapt and innovate on the best
practices and thus introduce methods that are
"better than the best."
Such best practice benchmarking, however, is
not very easy for an individual organization to
carry out on its own. Major difficulties are unfamiliarity
with sources of best practices, especially sources
from other countries; lack of support from best
practice organizations in sharing knowledge on
best practices; and prohibitive cost of gaining
best practice knowledge.
The APO BPN was specifically established to help
organizations overcome the above challenges and
enable them to perform international benchmarking.
The network is designed to address accessibility
problems, thus facilitating the transfer of knowledge
on the best practices of organizations in other
countries to the participating countries. The
network will leverage on its linkages with the
national productivity organizations (NPOs) located
throughout Asia and other productivity and quality
organizations worldwide.
More importantly, the best practice knowledge
generated from the APO BPN will be useful for
NPOs in helping their client organizations achieve
best practice performance standards, thus positioning
NPOs as leaders in this knowledge transfer.
This compendium is a documentation of the results
of the sharing and learning phase of the network
wherein selected leading organizations in Asia shared
their best practices in various APO BPN workshops.
The leading practices in this publication are intended
for adaptation and innovation of organizations with
the aim of gaining competitive advantage and business
excellence. These best practices can also be replicated
on a wider scale to achieve improvement in the overall
economic performance of Asian countries.
– SHIGEO TAKENAKA, APO Secretary-General,
Tokyo, November 2004
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