According to US Department of the Navy, Benchmarking is a strategic and analytic process of continuously measuring an organisation's products, services, and practices against a recognised leader in the studied area.
Successful benchmarking will help you:
- Find who does the process best and close the gap
- Recognise the leading organisations in a process or activity
- Create performance standards derived from an analysis of the best in business
- Ensure that comparisons are relevant
- Measure your performance, your processes, and your strategies against best in business
- Measure business processes
- Assess performance over time
- Accelerate continuous process improvement (CPI)
- Establish more credible goals for CPI
- Establish actionable objectives
- Discover and clarify new goals
- Establish customer expectations of business standards set by the best suppliers in industry
- Help your organisation achieve breakthrough improvements
- Create a sense of urgency for change
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Become direction setting
- Provide a positive, proactive structured process
Benchmarking does not:
- Copy the other's processes
- Steal other business confidentiality
- Stop. Benchmarking is a continuous process.
Reference:
- CIPS study guide page 49-51
- The Department of the Navy Benchmarking Handbook
LO 1, AC 1.3