| Combating the Current Scenario, Smartly! |
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| India is experiencing an industrial slowdown, a less positive growth. We are not in a recession. While it is easy to regress into gloom, it is also an opportunity for India Inc. to benchmark and innovate on how to become cost-intelligent. In other words, how to cut costs such that it does not affect the company’s competitiveness. We have two enablers for solutions. |
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| The BestPrax Club has a Knowledge Base of 1,000,000 managerial practices. Several case studies can enable a company to cut windows on how to become cost-intelligent. |
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| The BestPrax Club can also conduct Creativity Labs, to generate an outpouring of ideas, on how to become cost-intelligent for a specific business. |
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| Cheer up. The current economic scenario is an opportunity. Join the BestPrax Club. |
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| - Suresh Lulla |
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| Cross-industry Benchmarking |
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| HP manufactured printers in the US and distributed them globally through three distribution centres (DCs) in the US, Europe, and Far East with each region having different requirements. In the 1990s HP began to investigate the benefits of a product and process redesign by defining a push/pull boundary and implementing a postponement strategy for its distribution chain. |
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| Benetton served as a good case study. Each season, Benetton dyed yarn, knit sweaters, and then shipped the sweaters to retail stores. It was never clear until well into each season which colours would sell best. By reversing the process and getting rapid online feedback from retail outlets, they realised a huge return. |
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| Instead of dying the yarn first, Benetton knit the plain wool into sweaters and postponed colouring all the inventory. This is the cornerstone of supply chain management practice that HP is using today. Instead of shipping the finished products to its DCs, HP began to manufacture a generic printer at the factory in the US. The DC in each region did the final customisation with the power supply and the manual. |
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The printer itself had to be redesigned for these requirements. In the end HP could drastically reduce inventory levels and improve customer service measures! |
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Source: Economic Times, 3 August 2007 |
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| Benchmark: Create a Sustainable Organization |
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| Benchmarking and Innovation are vital managerial inputs for creating a sustainable organization, in a dynamic business environment. |
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“Benchmarking is the search for those best practices that will lead to the superior performance of a company.” |
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- Robert C Camp |
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| The BestPrax Knowledge Base allows member organizations to benchmark against over 1,000,000 papers on generic managerial practices. |
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Insights: Four page research papers on specific managerial issues. Each includes an introduction to the managerial issue, background, case studies, and links for further research. |
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Epsilons: Reports on BestPrax Roundtable proceedings. Each Roundtable focuses on generic managerial issues perceived to be ‘grey’ by BestPrax Members. |
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Partner Database: BestPrax Club is a partner of Business Performance Improvement Resource, New Zealand, for their knowledge base of global managerial practices built over the past years. |
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| The BestPrax Knowledge Base is available to all members as a package. |
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Clcik here to browse through the BestPrax Knowledge Base . |
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| The Benefits of External Benchmarking |
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| External benchmarking is a useful way of studying the various systems, processes and performance measures of successful organizations within the same industry or different industries and learning from them. |
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| External benchmarking may focus on various aspects such as: |
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Operational Benchmarking – with a focus on how other organizations perform and the manner in which they run their businesses. |
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Strategic Benchmarking – studying the strategies used by other organizations to perform successfully. |
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Competitive Benchmarking – looking at what, how and how well the competition is doing and learning from those practices. |
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Generic Benchmarking – this is all about comparing how well larger organizations in the same field run their systems and processes and deep dives into how other organizations function at each step of the processes for similar products or services. |
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Implicit Benchmarking – a study of the performance indicators in the industry based on data or published reports to do a comparison of how well an organization fares against the rest of the industry. |
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| Identify and Benchmark For Your Organization’s Negative Gaps |
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| It is easier to Benchmark when you have identified your organization’s negative gaps for a managerial practice. The BestPrax Barometer helps organizations identify their positive and negative gaps. |
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Please click here to sample the BestPrax Barometer . |
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| BestPrax Membership |
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| BestPrax Club offers two standard memberships: Blue and green; and three customized memberships: Silver, Gold, Platinum |
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