News & Articles

11.10.2011
What is there to benefit from Benchmarking?

Many businesses would like to know how well they are performing in comparison with their competitors, or even how the separate areas of their business are faring?

Benchmarking, either internally or externally is the best way to get these answers.

Measuring your performance in terms of time, quality and cost will help you to see which areas of your business you need to improve, and more specifically the individual processes that are perhaps leading to problems within your business. Applying the knowledge you learn from benchmarking effectively, could help facilitate an improved performance in critical functions within your organisation, or within key areas of the business.

Benchmarking can suit your needs whether you are looking to gain rapid market growth or whether you are looking to find the average performance level with your sector, it really does provide benefit for businesses of any stature. Your needs will depend on a number of factors including:

Your current market position
Your short term objectives
Your long term aims

The benchmarking process need not be limited to your own industry either. Benchmarking within your industry is of course a great place to start, but you will probably already have a pretty good idea how your industry performs. It may be wise therefore to reach outside and above your own industry into other industries that perform a similar process but may have to perform this process extremely well in order to succeed. For example, a hotel who has issues with their booking-in systems may benchmark themselves against the admittance processes of a hospital, as the smooth running of an admittance process in a hospital is critical to its success or failure.

By benchmarking effectively, you will see who else perfoms processes well, either inside or outside of your industry and then you can adapt these processes into your organisation.

To reap full benefit from benchmarking you should aim to use the data you receive as you would any other market data, attempt to set targets with it, set further objectives to help you get your company to where you want to be. The data could be of real use to you, and the slightest area of improvement may make the biggest difference.

Thinking of Business Benchmarking?