The Benefits of Benchmarking in Business Operations
Benchmarking your business operations with defined metrics can help track progress and reach goals faster. Here are the benefits of benchmarking.
- Businesses can use benchmarking to compare their performance to internal and external standards.
- Benchmarking may be used to assess internal development, competition performance, and the competitiveness of your business operations.
- In order to benchmark, you must first identify the essential indicators, evaluate where you are now, decide where you want to go, and then develop an action plan to help you get there.
- This article is for business owners who wish to set up a benchmarking system to monitor the growth and development of their operations.
There are certain standards that customers and workers have come to expect from any firm worth its salt in any industry. How can you determine whether your company is upholding such standards? Using benchmarks is the solution.
Even though every company is different and won’t take the same route to success, benchmarking provides you a reliable starting point for evaluating your operations. You’ll be better equipped to stay on top of industry changes and satisfy the needs of the current market by researching your rivals and contrasting your operations and product offerings to theirs.
According to Sahin Boydas, founder and CEO of RemoteTeam.com, “it’s crucial for leaders to understand what the market is offering, what is changing, and the new processes and technologies they need to implement to stay on top of the game.” There is always a cost associated with ignoring what is occurring in your corporate environment, according to “Leaders that operate without monitoring standards wind up being left behind.”
What you need to know about the method and advantages of benchmarking in your company’s operations is provided here.
What is benchmarking?
In business, benchmarking refers to evaluating the practices and procedures of other organizations in order to assess the quality, performance, and growth of your own. If you feel that there is room for improvement inside your company, you may compare how it performs to the “standard” and devise a strategy for improvement, whether it entails lowering expenses, increasing productivity and efficiency, or raising revenue.
Continuous improvement is the ultimate purpose of benchmarking, and all firms should strive for it. Comparing your company to others might assist you come up with strategies you can use to advance.
Types of business benchmarking
An organization can utilize benchmarking to assess a variety of operational areas versus internal and external norms. The main categories of benchmarking are:
Internal benchmarking
Internal benchmarking is all about enhancing your company by evaluating it against previous information. Internal benchmarking is a method for identifying the best, most effective processes and disseminating them throughout the business, whether you’re comparing organizational departments or various branch locations.
Boydas asserts that internal benchmarking may aid in reducing time and financial waste in a company. Businesses should concentrate on internal benchmarks like employee productivity and effectiveness as well as how staff members use the company’s products.
Keeping an eye on internal standards is one of the best ways to create resilient teams, according to Boyd as. “Benchmarking data assists firms in determining the most efficient methods to utilize employee talent, how to structure work to make it simple for both employees and management, and what elements of organizational procedures can be abandoned.”
Competitive benchmarking
Competitive benchmarking, as the name implies, involves setting objectives based on what your rivals are doing. Your company can obtain a competitive edge by researching the procedures and standards of other companies in order to equal or, preferably, beyond the industry norm.
According to Maida Zheng, senior adviser at The Logos Consulting Group, competitor standards may affect everything from staff compensation to customer services and even employee morale.
Understanding what your rivals are doing is not just plain sense, but very necessary if you want to remain ahead of the competition and give your staff the best work environment possible, Zheng told Business.com. Employees will realize they should stay with a firm if they have the chance for both financial and skill advancement and they are aware that their employer is keeping up with or staying ahead of the competition.
Strategic benchmarking
Strategic benchmarking, which takes a corporation one step beyond competitive benchmarking and aims to imitate certain performance criteria of world-class businesses This might include drawing inspiration from other industries, as was the case when Southwest Airlines based their upkeep, cleaning, and boarding procedures on the time-bound, well-defined activities of an efficient NASCAR pit crew.
Benefits of benchmarking in business
To effectively benefit from benchmarking, a business must assess its main operations consistently and continuously to make sure it is making progress toward its objectives.
Businesses that regularly do benchmarking can:
Keep improving internal operations.
Especially when compared to internal standards, benchmarking your processes and procedures may help your team improve its productivity and efficiency over time.
Understand what’s working and what isn’t.
You may spot trends and patterns that you might not have observed when they were occurring by doing a thorough, in-depth review of your company’s historical performance. You can clearly see from this data which habits and practices enhance overall business success and which ones don’t by looking at it.
Adopt or improve upon competitors’ practices.
When you research your rivals, you start to learn what they are doing well and wrong and what makes them successful. You may improve your position in the market and more effectively reach your target audience by modifying best practices employed by rivals to fit the requirements of your firm and avoiding methods that consumers or clients find objectionable.
Reduce costs by increasing efficiency.
The main goal of benchmarking is to increase performance via efficiency. You may simplify your operations and eventually help yourself keep more of your money by eliminating waste in your procedures, whether it be financial costs or time and effort wasted.
Focus on practices and offerings that promote customer satisfaction and loyalty.
You will have a better understanding of what your consumers enjoy and dislike as well as what you can do to maintain their business in the future by collecting feedback and data from customers (whether they be your own or those of your rivals).
What is a typical benchmarking process?
Benchmarking, in its most basic form, entails figuring out where you are, where you want to go, and how you want to get there. Here is a quick summary of the steps in the benchmarking procedure that the majority of firms use:
1. Plan out what you want to benchmark.
The first step in benchmarking is deciding what you want to measure. Define the activities you’re measuring and the main indicators you’ll use to evaluate success, whether it’s compensation, sales, team development, or another area of growth.
2. Conduct research to collect relevant data.
Once you’ve decided what you want to measure, you may start talking to the people who might be affected or involved in your business, such as customers, rivals, and workers. These parties may respond to surveys, one-on-one or in groups, and give insightful input that can help you with your benchmarking process.
You should also examine the present state of other businesses or departments. When comparing wages, for instance, you should check websites like Glassdoor and PayScale to see what other employers are willing to pay for the same positions and titles inside your company. You may more effectively create your own standard for gauging the performance of your business by being aware of the sector or departmental average.
3. Analyze the data to assess where you are and where you want to be.
You may compare your present performance to that of other businesses or departments using the information you’ve acquired and the research you’ve done, and you can use this information to set reasonable goals for improvement. You may get a comprehensive understanding of any performance gaps and how far you still have to go to reach your goal benchmark by presenting your statistics in an easy-to-understand style (such as graphs or charts).
4. Develop an action plan.
The benchmarking process’ implementation phase is when you’ll come up with concrete activities you and your stakeholders may take to accomplish your objectives. You have a clear route to achieving your benchmarks when you define success and create an action plan in advance.
Utilizing popular goal-setting techniques like SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Time-Bound) and HEART is an excellent place to start (Habit-Forming, Emotional, Actionable, Realistic, Time-Bound). You may use one of these strategies to divide your overarching benchmarking objectives (such as “grow sales”) into more manageable segments with set due dates (such as “reach out to five new prospects every week during the next quarter”).
5. Monitor your progress.
Check your team’s progress periodically against the outlined objectives in your action plan. It’s crucial to measure your metrics consistently, whether it’s weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Your plan has been effective if you are hitting your benchmarks, so keep going. If not, you might need to review your strategy and make course corrections.
Despite the fact that these procedures may be used to a wide range of business processes, your organization may choose to create a custom benchmarking procedure based on the objectives you have in mind. Some steps could be harder or need for outside assistance depending on where you are now and where you want to go.
Example of benchmarking
Concerned about where to start your benchmarking process? Here is a fictitious illustration of how it may operate in your company:
Both an organization’s IT department and customer service department utilize the same ticketing system. The chief operating officer observes that the IT team resolves 80% of their tickets within three days, which is substantially quicker than the customer service team, when she looks at the dashboard information.
She starts a benchmarking procedure for resolved tickets and researches the methods used by the IT team to achieve its objectives. The COO discovers that customer service tickets are given to whoever is on duty, whereas IT tickets are assigned to the team member with the highest knowledge in that area by the department head.
The customer service team decides to implement the IT team’s method of allocating tickets according to their level of competence and aims to reduce the average ticket closure time in half by the end of the subsequent month. Following this procedure for a few weeks allowed the customer support representatives to solve more problems each week and effectively meet the IT team’s close time goal.
How to make benchmarking work for your business
The most crucial thing you can do if your company wants to start benchmarking is to include your workers in the process. To achieve your benchmarking objectives, change is a challenging but essential component, therefore it’s crucial that everyone on your team is on board with what they must do, when they must do it, and how.
You can promote and develop innovation by allowing everyone a place at the table and a chance to speak, according to Zheng. The ideal proposal for enhancing a given process may be developed by a lower-level employee, illustrating that great ideas may emerge from anywhere in the business.
Don’t become complacent and believe that only senior managers can provide unique ideas, Zheng said. “Build a system that allows any employee to improve the firm and appropriately rewards them for realizing ideas.”
