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What is Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of determining who is the very best, who sets the standard,and what that standard is. In baseball, you could argue that seven consecutive WorldSeries Championships made the New York Yankees the benchmark.

If we were to benchmark "world conquest", what objective measure would we use tocompare Julius Caesar to Adolph Hitler; Gengis Khan to Napoleon? Which of them wasthe epitome, and why?

We do the same thing in business. Who is the best sales organization? The mostresponsive customer service department? The leanest manufacturing operation? And howdo we quantify that standard?

Why Should I Benchmark

If you don't know what the standard is you cannot compare yourself against it. If acustomer asks "What is the MTBF on your widget?" it is not enough to know that yourMean Time Between Failures is 120 hours on your standard widget and 150 for yourdeluxe widget.

You also have to know where your competitors stand. If the company against whom youare competing for this order has a MTBF of 100 hours you are probably okay. However,if their MTBF is 10,000 hours who do you think will get the order?

What can I Benchmark

Most of the early work in the area of benchmarking was done in manufacturing, like theexample above. Now benchmarking is a management tool that is being applied almostanywhere. The Fortune Magazine article "Beat the Budget and Astound your CFO"outlines how Rank Xerox even applied benchmarking to their sales effort.

Related Issues

Once we decide what to benchmark, and how to measure it, the object is to figure outhow the winner got to be the best and determine what we have to do to get there.

Benchmarking is usually part of a larger effort, usually a Process Re-engineering or

Quality Improvement initiative. The US Department of Energy'sQuality ManagementImplementation Guidelines shows one way of fitting it all together.

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Avoid these ten benchmarking mistakes

Benchmarking has become embedded in most organisations as part of the way they stay

competitive. But there are lots of opportunities for benchmarking to go wrong. Here are some ofthe most common mistakes organisations make when benchmarking, and how you can avoid them.

Mistake #1. Confusing benchmarking with participating in a survey.

A survey of organisations in a similar industry to yours is not really benchmarking, whatever itmay be called. Such a survey will give you some interesting numbers, but benchmarking is theprocess of finding out what is behind the numbers. In other words, a benchmarking survey maytell you where you rank, but it won't help you improve your position.

Mistake #2. Thinking there are pre-existing "benchmarks" to be found.

Just because some survey or study says that a cost of $2.35 is the "benchmark" cost of a particulartransaction, does not mean that you must perform that transaction for that price. The so-called"benchmark" may simply not be applicable to your markets, customers or resource levels. Insist onidentifying your own benchmarking partners and finding out from them what is achievable, and

then whether you can achieve a similar level ofperformance.

Mistake #3. Forgetting about service delivery and customer satisfaction.

Benchmarking stories abound of organisations that have become so fixated on the cost ofproviding their product or service that they have failed to take the customer into account. Paringdown the costs often rebounds in lesser service delivery, so customers go elsewhere and ultimatelyyou don't have a business. Take a "balanced scorecard" approach when developing your

benchmarking metrics.

Mistake #4. The process is too large and complex to be manageable.

A process is a group of tasks. A system is a group of processes. Avoid trying to benchmark a totalsystem - it will be extremely costly, take ages, and be difficult to remain focused. Better to selectone or several processes that form a part of the total system, work with it initially and then moveon to the next part of the system.

Mistake #5. Confusing benchmarking with research.

Benchmarking presupposes that you are working on an existing process that has been in operation

long enough to have some data about its effectiveness and its resource costs. Commencing a newprocess, such as developing a new employee handbook by collecting other people's handbooks andtaking ideas from them, is research, not benchmarking.

Mistake #6. Misalignment.

Choosing a benchmarking topic that is not aligned with the overall strategy and goals of thebusiness &endash; or worse, cuts across some other initiative the organisation is already taking. A

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Lead Team at the strategic level needs to oversee the benchmarking project and make sure that itis in line with what is happening in the business as a whole.

Mistake #7. Picking a topic that is too intangible and difficult to measure.

"Employee communication" is probably the most slippery concept that exists in an organisation,

but it is often cited as one of the worst problems, so many organisations try to benchmark it.Encourage your benchmarking team to select instead a part of the topic that can be observed andmeasured; for instance, the process of distributing memos around the organisation.

Mistake #8. Not establishing the baseline.

Going out to make benchmarking visits before you have analysed your own process thoroughly.Benchmarking assumes that you already know your own process and its level of performancethoroughly. After all, that information is what you have to offer to your benchmarking partners inexchange for the information you are seeking from them. Make sure your benchmarking team is

very clear about what it wants to learn before you approach potential benchmarkingpartners.

Mistake #9. Not researching benchmarking partners thoroughly.

This is essential in selecting the right benchmarking partners, so you don't waste their time oryours. There is a rule of benchmarking etiquette that says you should never ask a benchmarkingpartner a question that you should have been able to answer for yourself through researching theliterature in the public domain.

Mistake #10. Not having a code of ethics and contract agreed with partners.

Your partners should be clear about what you are seeking to learn from them, how thatinformation will be treated, who will have access to it and for what purposes it will be used.Ideally, this should be formally agreed. The benchmarking code of practice offered by the

American Productivity and Quality Centre provides a useful model.