FOREWORD

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In its commitment to enhance the productivity and competitiveness of organizations in the Asia-Pacific region, the Asian Productivity Organization (APO) has established the APO Best Practice Network (APO-BPN). It aims to generate, share, and transfer knowledge on best practices that will enable organizations in APO member countries improve their performance.

This second Compendium of Best Practices (Volume II) is a result of a year of benchmarking among participating national productivity organizations (NPOs) culminating in the 2005 APO-BPN Workshop in Bangkok, Thailand, where the NPO customer organizations shared their best practices. Volume I of the Compendium was similarly produced with best practices shared on three topics—People Performance Management, Balanced Scorecard, and Frontline Customer Service.

The best practices featured in Volume II also revolve around three topics — innovation culture, organizational excellence in SMEs, and how to do local benchmarking. To maximize productivity and competitiveness in today’s knowledge economy, a culture of innovation is critical. Promoting organizational excellence among SMEs is also imperative as they are the economic backbone of a country and major contributors to GDP. Although there are proven benefits of organizational excellence models in large organizations, concerns arise regarding their unwieldy nature and resource load when these models are applied in their raw form to small organizations. Local benchmarking is important as well to parallel international benchmarking efforts of the APO-BPN. Some NPOs have had success in implementing local benchmarking and linking this with the APO-BPN to maximize knowledge transfer in their own countries. Other NPOs want to learn how best to do it and how to support their customers in benchmarking.

The Compendium uses the same format for both Volume I and II. The format consists of important knowledge base to understand the best practice in all aspects such as organizational profile, rationale and objectives of the best practice, its overall description, leading practices adopted, benefits gained, lessons learned, key performance indicators/measures, recent improvements, and next steps for continuous improvement. The best practice companies have likewise been coded for the purpose of emphasizing the best practice rather than the company.

Volume II has been compiled as a result of the success of Volume I in assisting NPOs in their task of helping their customer organizations to improve. Through this Compendium, NPOs will now have the opportunity to disseminate best practice knowledge on the above topics in their own countries.

Shigeo Takenaka
Secretary-General
Tokyo, February 2007