1.17 Best Practice Benchmarking
Benchmarking is the pursuit of the best organisations out there (in your field) to learn from their successful practices. This is a continuous thing and you should look at the processes in connection with the results to find out how to improve your processes in case your results lag behind (process benchmarking in relation to results benchmarking).
Problems:
\- Hard to identify the best
\- catching up might be impossible -> de-motivating
\- You are catching up to a moving target
\- copying is not innovating
Benchmarking has now moving from simply financial analysis to competitor analysis to performance benchmarking to best practice process benchmarking
It seems to be seen as the easy and manageable way to find the best and improve.
Types of Benchmarking
1\. Internal benchmarking: one area against another or e.g. one hotel against another; data is easily obtainable; not looking at best as such;
2\. Competitive benchmarking: look at competitors in same sector; big companies often have info public in reports otherwise they need to be willing to share;
3\. Functional benchmarking: only methods are looked at which can happen over sectors; can lea to innovative things as not bound to your sector
4\. Generic benchmarking: just look at others to learn e.g. for safety issues.
To correctly describe processes you need to be able to describe them -> process mapping. 1996 Fisher described a few possibilities.
1\. Performances and practices
On one side of a wall list the processes and on the other the elements of those processes that needs to be discussed.
2\. Flow Charting
You use symbolic language to convey sequential steps. X-Achsis would be the symbols and Y-achsis the steps. One of the symbols could be delay for example.
3\. Arrow/mind map
Shows interrelations by a series of decision trees.
4\. Cause and effect
Draw a timeline with herringbone lines where some thing effects the operation. Show links between units.
5\. Supply chain
Building a chain by linking essential elements.
6\. Matrix
Useful where you need two perspectives like staffing company and department.
You need to choose that technique that will get you to the heart of the matter and then ask the right people if you are correct as verification.
Problems of benchmarking include:
\- What to benchmark
\- Who is “best in class”
\- Staff resistance
\- Resource constraints
\- Confidentiality
\- Sometimes process components are un-transferable
\- The focus is not in tomorrow
To do benchmarking well you need:
\- Position of benchmarking champion with full management support and enough resources and authority
\- get the right people on the team
\- Co-ordinate for continual work
\- create information partnerships with other companies/departments
Why you benchmark can have a number of reasons. In the public sector it is mostly done for accountability reasons and to protect against criticism.