Competitive Benchmarking
Benchmarking allows comparing the performances of a company with those of other companies, to determine the areas and activities needing improvement projects, as regards both organization and technologies.
When starting a benchmarking project, be aware that it cannot be limited to a simple comparison but shall use the obtained results to improve/review in a dynamic way the used practices.
Therefore, the result can be a new designing of company processes or an incremental improvement.
Main areas of intervention:
- To compare different seats of the same company to define the best practices and “export” them to the other business units;
- To compare overall performances (for instance commercial, financial, and logistic ones) of two or more different companies belonging to the same industrial sector;
- To compare the performances of a specific process with the
“best in class” of the same process (even if belonging to another industrial sector);
- To start actions of continuous improvement thanks also to the benchmarking repetition(Plan - Do - Check - Action).
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the method
Project definition
In this phase, the main areas of analysis, the definition of the KPIs to be determined, the period of time to be analyzed and any safety measures regarding anonymity to be implemented will be set, through the analysis of the already existing reports and the discussion with the managers of the concerned units.
Data collection and definition of the analysis tool
Once the analysis areas and the report structure have been defined, the methods to gather data are set, which can be collected either automatically (through special sw procedures to extract data from the company ERP) or manually (taking data on site through specific procedures).
Final report
and improvement guidelines
The final report will include the general benchmarking results (presented in a plenary meeting) and the results obtained by each single involved unit in relation to the benchmark defined during project. Each single report will contain a series of guidelines to improve the obtained performances.
Continuous Benchmarking
The created benchmarking system can be used again analyzing the difference both among involved actors and the previously determined situation, in order to stress the effectiveness of the introduced improvement actions.
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