knowledge base
Benchmarking
Tips- Be sure that the process being proposed for a benchmarking study is critical to your customers’ satisfaction.
- Start the planning effort with developing a sound project plan. Elements of your plan should include:
- Goals and Objectives: Be sure that these are measurable and realistic.
- Scope and Resources: Refine the scope to a few key areas of the process because benchmarking all aspects of an operation would be difficult and costly.
- Team members and roles: Assign people familiar with the process as well as decision makers. Make sure they understand their roles and responsibilities.
- Critical Success factors: Define the few key areas that are required for your organization or department’s success. These factors may include: customer relations, productivity, efficiency, new products/services, shortened cycle times, and technological capabilities.
- Potential Benefits: identify improvement opportunities/benefits. Identify Milestones and Outputs.
- Establish performance measures: Identify a list of measures that helps you compare the performance of your process to that of your benchmarking partner.
- The 5 Benchmarking steps follow Deming's Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle much like the DMAIC model does. Benchmarking, like every other process, needs to be continuously improved. The best-in-class companies are not standing still, but continually improve. The Maturity step of the process ensures that the improvements gained are held, and when additional improvements are needed, then it kicks back in to first four steps.
- Utilize the tools from the Tool Kit to help in your Benchmarking study.
- Market research and customer surveys, trade publications, and industry participants, annual and financial reports, are useful resources when identifying benchmarking partners.
- Pay careful attention to the design of useful questionnaire forms and data collection sheets to capture pertinent information when visiting your partner. This will facilitate implementation of your findings.
- Document your partner visit well and immediately debrief the team after the trip. The next day you may have forgotten 20-30% of what you saw and heard.
- Remember that the focus of the analysis step is on what can be learned from your Benchmarking partner. Use internal experts to help determine the gap between your process an your partner's process.
- Your Benchmarking results will lead to change in your processes. And we all know that change is difficult. Communicate your Benchmarking findings and make sure that the people working in the process are well educated and trained on the changes.