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Benchmarking
Benchmarking involves evaluating your performance against external criteria. It is a case of looking outward – outside of a particular business, organisation, industry, region or country – to examine how others achieve their performance levels and to understand the processes they use and if these can be applied to your own business.
The search for best practice can exist inside your own industry and also in other industries. Are there lessons to be learned from other industries?
The objective of benchmarking is to understand and evaluate the current position of a business or organisation in relation to best practice and to identify areas and means of performance improvement.
In this way, benchmarking helps to explain the processes behind excellent performance. When lessons learned from a benchmarking exercise are applied appropriately, they facilitate improved performance in critical functions within an organisation or in key areas of the business.
Royston Parkin can provide a benchmarking service by comparing your business processes and performance against what would be widely considered to be an industry standard or best practice.
We provide a snapshot of the performance of your business and help you understand how that compares to a particular standard. We evaluate various aspects of the processes against that of best practice companies, usually within a peer group defined for the purposes of comparison.
This allows you to develop plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices to increase specific aspects of performance.
Benchmarking should not be considered a one-off exercise.
To be effective, it must become an integral part of an ongoing improvement process, the goal being ever-improving best practice. Royston Parkin are happy to suggest steps and strategies for ongoing improvement.
The application of benchmarking involves four key steps:
- Understand in detail existing business processes
- Compare your own business performance with that of others analysed
- Analyse the business processes of others
- Implement the steps necessary to close the performance gap
Types of benchmarking covered:
- Process benchmarking
- Performance benchmarking
- Financial benchmarking
- Strategic benchmarking