About Benchmarking

What is Benchmark?

Benchmark is an extremely accurate tool or a device to assess the standard or performance or improvement of a business or any other function.

What is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is the process of understanding key issues within your own organization and learning from other who are better. It is a process of continuous improvement, a means of identifying and achieving “ Best of the Best” for any chosen area of activity. Benchmarking is all about setting standards. Quality is the degree of excellence of a thing from the customer point of view.

TQM is all areas where quality is applied. TQM is a commitment to a company-wide culture where everyone is clear of the direction and objective of the organization and in support of each other to achieve these goals. Now I think all confusions regarding benchmarking, quality and TQM are over. Benchmarking can be useful in many areas of business; the following are the areas where benchmarking is important to achieve superiority in the competitive business world.

Business Planning Policy Development Solving Deployment Solving Business problems Continues Improvement Customer Satisfaction Cultural Change Continuous Learning Managing by facts Business Process Improvement Strategy Development

Methodology of Benchmarking

There are around fourteen methodologies for benchmarking process in the present business world. Here we will be using Rank Xerox Methodology.

This entails five phases involving ten steps.

Planning

1. Identify what is to be benchmarked

2. Identify comparative companies

3. Determine data collection methods

Analysis

4. Determine current performance ‘gap’

5. Project future performance levels

Integration

6. Communicate benchmarking findings and gain acceptance

7. Establish functional goals

Action

8. Develop action plans

9. Implement specific action and monitor progress

10. Recalibrate benchmark

By Cinoy Ravindran | Posted on 2007-07-03 01:06:42

About The Author:

Cinoy Ravindran is a Computing Engineer, specializing in solution/ concept selling in Information Technology, Wealth Management, as well as Stress Management.

Read his blogs http://cinoy-tickets.blogspot.com/

Definition:

Benchmarking (also "best practice benchmarking" or "process benchmarking") is a process used in management and particularly strategic management, in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best practice, usually within their own sector. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to adopt such best practice, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Benchmarking may be a one-off event, but is often treated as a continuous process in which organizations continually seek to challenge their practices. A process similar to benchmarking is also used in technical product testing and in land surveying. See the article benchmark for these applications.

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