Benchmarking Activity Continues to Increase

We are still seeing a great deal of activity in benchmarking. It seems more and more organizations are developing "thou shalt benchmark" edicts for many areas, especially those in a support role or a shared service. The traditional "back off" functions and process like Finance, Human Resources, IT, etc. But, more and more of the forward- or customer-facing processes are getting in the act. A lot of efforts in supply chain and customer service processes.

The traditional approach to only benchmark with competitors is still alive, as well. We aren't doing a good enough job promoting the benefits of learning from other industries and sectors, but we'll keep trying. We are making some headway, though.

Many of the requests remain metric in nature, as well. Still plenty of qualitative benchmarking going on, but a great surge in the need for comparative metrics.

Share your experiences and thoughts. What is going on within your organization regarding benchmarking?

Where should benchmarking "sit"?

One of the other key debates I'm hearing right now around benchmarking is where it should reside, "sit", or report within the organization. I've heard Strategic Planning, the Quality group, HR, and finance.

Where does benchmarking reside within your organization?

Internal Benchmarking First?

I'm seeing a lot in the literature (and hearing from our Members) about the focus on benchmarking internally before going outside to benchmark. There are some really good books on this topic, like Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, (Douglas Rushkoff) and Ideas are Free (Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder).

This seems contradictory to many organizations or individuals. They feel they must talk to others (outside of their organization) to learn new things or innovate. We find this many times, though. We'll do a benchmarking project with "Company A" and we'll identify, screen, and verify another area of "Company A" as a best-practice organization.

Does your organization look internally first for new ideas, innovation, or benchmarking information?

Another Good Benchmarking White Paper

I thought I would continue to share some resources around benchmarking. The document noted here is a great resource for Senior Management around the topic of benchmarking.

Access the document here.

Great Benchmarking White Paper

Here is a great white paper that gives an overview of some of the classic tenets of benchmarking. Uses Finance & Accounting as an example. Click here.
Hope it helps.

Benchmarking Still Widely Used and Popular According to Bain Study

Bain & Company does an annual survey of cease about their use and satisfaction with different management tools. The 2005 study is out (http://www.bain.com/management_tools/home.asp).

Benchmarking is being used pretty heavily and the satisfaction is still pretty high among the study group. How heavily used is benchmarking within your organization? How satisfied do you feel your executives are with benchmarking?

What drives use and satisfaction within your organization?
My take on this topic is that satisfaction is very much linked to how your organization utilizes and views benchmarking. If benchmarking findings are carried into actual improvement activities and changes are made, satisfaction will go up. If you stop at the point of finding the best practice and don't carry it any further, then satisfaction will drop. There is some satisfaction in knowing, but not nearly as much as in doing!

Many organization view benchmarking as negative. They do it because they are forced to compare themselves to others by management or an external pressure (i.e., major customers - if they are a supplier, certification programs, etc.). Most of the times, these organizations do benchmarking to be able to check an item off their list and say, "we did it", they don't view it as a valuable activity or a learning opportunity. Obviously, satisfaction will be low.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Enterprise-Wide Process Management

I had an interesting discussion with one of our Members today, they were telling me that they are looking for examples of organizations that have:

• Done a good job of identifying, defining, and documenting key business processes across the enterprise;
• Identified process-owners for the enterprise-wide processes

Specifically, they are looking for enterprise-wide processes that span numerous major departments. The example they gave me, not sure if this is the one that they are studying, was customer order management. That includes many different groups from finance, to production, to sales, to customer service, etc.

Let me know if you have any experience in this area, or know of others that have undertaken this type of effort.