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| What is Benchmarking? |
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Benchmarking is your key to becoming the BEST OF THE BEST
- Robert Camp
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Benchmarking is a positive, proactive process to change operations in a structured fashion to achieve superior performance. The benefits of using benchmarking are that functions are forced to investigate external industry best practices and incorporate those practices into their operations. This leads to profitable, high-asset utilization businesses that meet customer needs and have a competitive advantage.
[Robert C. Camp, Benchmarking - The Search for Industry Best Practices that Lead to Superior Performance. Page 3]
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Professors Zairi and Al-Mashari summarised the operational and cultural benefits of benchmarking in the following way:
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- Removes the need to ‘reinvent the wheel’;
- Leads to ‘outside-the-box’ thinking, encouraging organisations to look for ways to improve that come from outside;
- Forces organisations to examine current processes, which can often lead to improvement in itself;
- Accelerates change and restructuring by using tested and proven methods and creating a sense of urgency when gaps are identified;
- Allows the organisation to focus externally and constantly capture opportunities and counter potential threats;
- Helps prevent complacency and inertia within the organisation and its people by setting stretch goals and stimulating new ways to plan for the future;
- Promotes the emergence and evolution of a ‘learning culture’ throughout the organisation;
- Promotes the development of a customer-centric culture by constantly reminding people of the customer and focusing on critical processes that add value;
- Overcomes the ‘not-invented-here’ mindset by offering evidence that ideas invented outside the organisation can and do work.
[Zairi, M and Al-Mashri, M. (2005), The role of benchmarking in best practice management and knowledge sharing. The Journal of Computer Information Systems. Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 14.]
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