The I.T. industry is well known for its jargon and acronyms. Amongst others, a term that is frequently used during planning and development at Abel is “APICS”. If you were asked what APICS stands for, would you know?
I certainly didn’t know when I joined Abel Software; but it didn’t take long for me to be indoctrinated by my fellow teammates that Abel has been purposely designed and built on the principles and methodologies of APICS.
So where is all this going? Well I thought I would share with you what I learnt about the organization.
The story starts in 1957 where, a group of 20 production control managers got together in Cleveland and formed the “American Production and Inventory Control Society” (founding name).
Nowadays the organization is branded; “APICS The Association for Operations Management”.
APICS is the global leader and premium source of education and qualification in Production, Inventory, Materials Management, Purchasing and Logistics. The organization has 43,000 individual members and 10,000 companies worldwide subscribe. APICS offers foundation courses, workshops and certifications.
APICS defines operations management as “the field of study that focuses on the effective planning, scheduling, use and control of a manufacturing or service organization through the study of concepts from design engineering, industrial engineering, management information systems, quality management, production management, inventory management, accounting, and other functions as they affect the organization”. It’s interesting to see how of ERP “Enterprise Resource Planning” (yet another acronym) fits into the above definition. Below is a chart of the APICS certifications which show ERP business processes alongside the two certifications.
Having people that have been through one of the many courses or are APICS certified is invaluable given how important business systems are to an organization. Many of our customers who are manufacturing and supply chain organizations have employees that are APICS certified in either;
- CPIM Certified Production Inventory Management – Providing the ability to understand and evaluate Production and Inventory activities within a company’s global operations and;
- CSCP Certified Supply Chain Professional – Helping demonstrate the knowledge and organizational skills for developing more streamlined Operations.
As mentioned above Abel has been constructed around the principles of APICS meaning that Abel uses the processes and terminology which are recognized industry-wide.
The APICS website is worth a browse: www.apics.org. I found the Partner & Event Finder Page useful as you can search for course providers and events in your region.
