Benchmarking

What is Benchmarking?


"Benchmarking is a tool to help you improve your business processes. Any business process can be benchmarked."

"Benchmarking is the process of identifying, understanding, and adapting outstanding practices from organizations anywhere in the world to help your organization improve its performance."

"Benchmarking is a highly respected practice in the business world. It is an activity that looks outward to find best practice and high performance and then measures actual business operations against those goals."

One of the biggest mistakes people make when beginning their benchmarking endeavor is that they only look to benchmark someone within their own industry. Although this doesn't hurt, you probably already know enough about your industry to know what works and what doesn't. Worse yet, some people think they must benchmark their competitor. What if the competition is worse than your company? Seems like a pretty big waste of time end energy. Instead how about benchmarking a company that is well known for being a good model. Sometimes referred to as Best Practices, Exemplary Practices, Business Excellence.

By Benchmarking you will find out;

Who performs the business process very well and has process practices that are adaptable to your own organization
Who is the most compatible for you to benchmark with
If you need to conduct a comprehensive benchmark study or if you can obtain 80-90% of what you need from just using the telephone, email, or an electronic survey to communicate your needs with other members on The Benchmarking Exchange
Most business processes are common throughout industry. For example; NASA has the same fundamental Human Resources requirements for hiring and developing employees as does American Express. British Telecom has the same Customer Satisfaction Survey process as Brooklyn Union Gas. These processes, albeit from different industries, are all common and can be benchmarked very effectively. It's called "getting out of the box".


Benchmarking -
Past, Present and Future

Top-10 Benchmarked Business Processes

The following chart shows the most actively benchmarked business processes members of The Benchmarking Exchange (TBE) are engaged in. The data is collected from thousands of TBE members and ranked by the most benchmarked process for the most recent twelve months. The purpose of this ranking is to show what business processes are being focused on the most and to provide a bit of insight as to what to expect in the near future. The top-10 Business Processes shown are among hundreds of business processes and sub-processes tracked in TBE's Posting Board(sm) database. This report is real-time so you know exactly what's being benchmarked NOW!

Members may click on any Business Process in the chart below to display a summary of postings then drill down to view details of each posting. If you are interested in learning more about the project or study contained in the posting simply contact the member who appears in the posting for more information. This is an excellent way to learn improvement ideas without having to start a study of your own. If a posting is already in the database then chances are the Member has information they can share with you. Use the information from others so you don't have to re-invent the wheel.

Business Process Ranking
INFORMATION SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY 1
EMPLOYEE BENEFITS COMPENSATION INCENTIVE PROGRAMS 2
CUSTOMER SERVICE SATISFACTION 3
EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT TRAINING 4
HUMAN RESOURCES 5
MARKETING 6
PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT IMPROVEMENT 7
SIX SIGMA 8
CALL CENTERS HELP DESKS 9
DELIVERY DISTRIBUTION FREIGHT LOGISTICS 10


TOP-10 Benchmarking Organizations


The following is a ranking of organizations that are heavily engaged in benchmarking. These member organizations have implemented internal benchmarking methodologies and practices to support their entire organizations' efforts to improve their products and services for both internal and external Customers.

These organizations are excellent role models for you to learn how to deploy benchmarking throughout your workgroup, department, division or entire organization. They are leaders! To contact someone from one of these organizations visit the Member Directory. (Note: the ability to access this service is available to Members only).

Organization Ranking
Bank of America 1
Xerox 2
TRW 3
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs 4
U.S. Army 5
Saudi Aramco 6
NASA 7
CSC 8
DynMcDermott 9
Social Security Administration 10