Question

Create a conversation between you and one of your colleagues explaining what is benchmarking, give an example?

Answer 1

Elsa: What is benchmarking?

Evin: Benchmarking is an approach of setting goals and measuring the productivity of firms based on best industry practices or against the products, services, and practices of its competitors or other acknowledged leaders in the industry.

Elsa: How benchmarking help businesses?

Evin: Benchmarking helps businesses in improving performance by learning from the best practices and the processes by which they are achieved. It helps an organization to get ahead of the competition.

Elsa: Which are the various steps in benchmarking?

Evin: The various steps are:

1. Identifying the need for benchmarking

2. Clearly understanding existing decisions processes

3. Identify best processes

4. Comparison of own process and performance with that of others

5. Prepare a report and implement the steps necessary to close the performance gap.

6. Evaluation

Elsa: How benchmarking is useful for firms?

Evin: Firms can use the benchmarking process to achieve improvements in a diverse range of management functions like:

• Maintenance operations
• Assessment of total manufacturing costs
• Product development
• Product distribution
• Customer services
• Plant utilization levels
• Human resource management

Elsa: So benchmarking is a panacea for all problems.

Evin: It is not a panacea for all problems. Rather, it studies the circumstances and processes that help in superior performance. Better processes are not merely copied. Efforts are made to learn, improve, and evolve them to suit the organizational requirements. Further, benchmarking exercises are also repeated periodically so that the organization does not lag in the dynamic environment.

Elsa: Can you give an example of benchmarking.

Evin: A technology company may monitor the specification of their competitor's products and compare them to their own, or measure their product life cycle against industry averages to ensure that they stay competitive.