How Benchmarking Can Give You A Competitive Edge

Enable stronger decision-making and raise aspiration levels at your organization by learning the best techniques for benchmarking industry competitors.

Benchmarking is gathering data and insights that enable stronger decision-making and operational control within an organization. It can be done both internally across a large organization as well as externally to gain visibility into what others are doing and their resulting performance. Benchmarking is an important tool for any organization as they manage evolving strategies, growth and change that is always around us.
Benchmarking mirrors the continuous improvement efforts that may already exist in an organization. It helps blend continuous improvement and breakthrough improvement into a single change management system. While benchmarking readily integrates with strategic initiatives such as continuous improvement, re-engineering, and total quality management, it also delivers value to the organization on its own as a discrete process providing those insights that enable stronger management.
When an organization begins a benchmarking initiative, a common mistake is to limit the benchmarking activity to industry peers. Benchmarking industry peers are essential; however, most organizations already have a good idea how their industry performs. Looking beyond your peers, competitors and industry opens up insights that can identify opportunities to gain the important edge. For breakthrough improvement, it is imperative to learn from other industries performing a similar process successfully. Learning from other organizations and using their successfully demonstrated practices, ideas, and insights reduces costs and cycle time and ultimately provides a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Faculty

Jeffery Varney, PMI PMP

American Productivity Quality Company