APQC (American Productivity & Quality Center) is a leading authority on benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement, and knowledge management (KM).

APQC’s Process Classification Framework® (PCF) is a taxonomy of business processes that allows organizations to objectively track and compare their performance internally and externally with organizations from any industry. 

The VTO plug-in includes data from PCF version 7.4.0 that is ready to use for the Enterprise Architect. This data is organized using two notations:

  • APQC-PCF classification: top level structure organized in packages

L1. Category: the highest level of the process framework. Thirteen Categories have been defined, such as “Develop and Manage Products and Services” or “Develop and Manage Human Capital."

L2. Process Group: indicates a group of processes that are part of executing a Category.

  • Ready-to-use APQC-PCF templates: a low-level structure modeled with Standard Operational Activities.

L3. Process: a single process; it is the name for a series of steps required to achieve a particular result

L4. Activity: a key step performed to execute a process.

L5. Task: an element of work that goes into executing an activity. Tasks are the most fine-grained elements of the PCF, and they often vary among industries and organizations.