Benchmarking is essentially an in-depth critical examination of an organization, product or process to determine how it compares with other organization, product or process which may be considered as being ‘best in class’.

Best practice needs to be:

• Identified
• Analyzed
• Translated  

into a format which is meaningful to the organization that intends to benefit from it.

The translation process is of critical importance so that the personnel involved can visualize how best practice methodologies can be both adapted and adopted into the organization. This can be achieved by:

• Access to industry information
• Visits to ‘best practice’ organizations
• Combination of both

However, there is a need to have some consistency or standardization across the industry and so there have been developed standards against which organizations can effectively benchmark themselves.

Learning as a Benchmarking Outcome:

Critical analysis of the benchmarking information allows the organization to:

• Learn about itself in detail.
• Clearly establish knowledge gaps and performance gaps that require new learning to fix them.
• Clearly establish what competencies can be further exploited for overall benefit.

The ability to learn is a crucial ingredient in any benchmarking activity, otherwise what has been uncovered with regard to the organization itself or the best in class organization, will not be, indeed cannot be implemented to provide long-term benefit.  That is why training is so important.  Attending training seminars or training workshops to improve your business skills can help with the benchmarking process.  Even elearning courses today address this issue.

Successful Benchmarking:

Benchmarking must be undertaken and structured as a project.  This means that benchmarking activity must be: 

• Planned with clear objectives and time lines.
• Resourced appropriately.
• Shown to be of benefit and not for blame.
• Communicated in an open manner.
• Involve whatever personnel are relevant to it.

Each of these requirements must be attended to in order to ensure that the benchmarking project will have a high probability of success.  The impact of failing to provide the necessary prerequisites for a benchmarking project will be evident as damage to the outcome, by either preventing any success at all or by reducing the level of success to below the full potential.

ZimTech Training Solutions is training Tampa and other major cities across the U.S. in Benchmarking and other corporate training skills.  To learn more, visit our website at www.zimtechtraining.com