Benchmarking for Businesses: Measure and improve your company's performance

Benchmarking for businesses

Key information

Names: Benchmarking, standardisation, comparative analysis.

Uses: It is mainly used in business, although it is increasingly observed in the hospital sector and public services. By its nature, benchmarking can be applied in all departments of a company, from IT to customer service to after-sales service.

Why is it successful? This type of strategy helps to the risks associated with development and innovation, as an organisation can adopt the practices, developed by others, that are already successful.

Key words:

Benchmark: A standard or baseline against which a performance indicator can be measured.

Benchmarking: Evaluation of a tool, procedure, or even a company for the purpose of comparing it with other evaluations.

Best practices: Exemplary practices and procedures observed in a particular company.

Competitor: A person or association that competes with others within the same sector.

Market: Strictly speaking, all of the companies, customers and suppliers who carry out the same activity; in a broader sense, it includes the products, raw materials and third parties that interact with the market.

Performance indicator: Measure resulting from an evaluation of a procedure.

Positioning: Position occupied by a product or company (culture, value) in a market, defined in relation to other competitors.

Re-engineering: Reorganisation of a procedure or product with the aim of improving it.

Xerox: American company that manufactures copiers and printers, which used benchmarking to grow.

Introduction

Benchmarking is a performance analysis and re-engineering method. The major advantage of this kind of approach is that it discovers and studies the best practices of the best companies in terms of production, delivery, quality, choice of suppliers, etc., and then considers how