ABOUT BENCHMARKING
What is Benchmarking?
Benchmarking gives you a tested, effective way to gauge where you stand in relation to your competitors. Simply put, benchmarking measures, analyzes, and compares your business practices with the best practices of your peers and competitors.
Benchmarking is generally carried out within the same industry, although it can also be carried out between organizations with similar processes in different industries. By benchmarking similar processes across industries, companies can sometimes achieve better results than by measuring themselves against their own industry.
Comparing data across industries, regions, or departments helps companies gain insight into their relative strengths and weaknesses. It can also give them a new perspective on their business model. Such comparisons can be crucial to prepare for making informed, strategic decisions and increasing market share.
Benchmarking a process across industries invites people to challenge old assumptions that may be contributing to their business problems. A "best practice" is any practice, knowledge, know-how, or experience that has proved to be valuable or effective within one organization, and may have fruitful applications in other organizations.
Why Benchmark?
Benchmarking delivers credible evidence of the best practices of top-performing companies in your industry. It's a natural step in goal-setting, and a priceless aid to improving processes. Benchmarking will help you understand whether you can successfully adopt other companies' methods to improve your own business practices.
The benchmarking process concludes by communicating the findings to interested parties, then developing an action plan to implement any decided-upon changes. It is important to note that benchmarking is an ongoing process - to maintain your competitive advantage, benchmarking should be conducted on a regular, ongoing basis.
Benchmarking is an effective way to build continuous improvement into your company's overall business strategy. It tends to open up organizations to change, thus furthering the goal of competitive excellence.
In benchmarking, it's important to establish the right foundation. Some areas to examine are: whom to benchmark against, which functions to compare, and how to conduct the benchmarking process.
Benchmarking as a Decision-Making Aid for Management
Benchmarking collects volumes of data from participating organizations and turns it into meaningful information that management can use to help them make strategic decisions. Clearly defined reports and analyses give managers a solid basis for making better and timelier business decisions.
Companies use the benchmarking process to measure, monitor, and analyze their environment, better understand their business model, identify trends, optimize performance, and make decisions regarding their future.
Because the benchmarking process delivers realistic measures of a company's performance, it helps management gauge how well the organization is performing, and decide where improvements are overdue. Benchmarking paints a realistic picture of current market conditions, and delivers valuable data for making budgetary decisions such as which projects should be pursued, and where cutbacks can safely be made.
Problems with Current Benchmarking Tools
Beyond SQL solves large-scale problems and inefficiencies associated with the traditional benchmarking software. These limitations include:
- Limited support for all stages of benchmarking
- Poor integration; not a global solution
- Not flexible
- Limited scalability
- High cost