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Today benchmarking is an essential ingredient in strategic planning and operational improvement. Long-range strategies if not survival require organizations to continuously change and adapt to the known marketplace of today and the expected market of tomorrow to remain competitive and deliver on today's imperatives of more, better, faster, cheaper.
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BACKGROUND
From its humble beginnings as the surveyor's standard reference mark for elevation and sometimes position (latitude and longitude), the notion of a benchmark and benchmarking have become almost obligatory for any organization wanting to improve its products, services, or processes to better serve customers and improve business results. In today's business application, the benchmark is that performance objective which incorporates the best practice, the epitome or standard of excellence; and benchmarking is the activity of learning, exchanging, and adapting best practices to your organization. Benchmarking is finding and implementing best practices.
The Japanese word dantotsu--striving to be the best of the best--captures the essence of benchmarking. Benchmarking is a positive, proactive process to change operations in a structured fashion to achieve superior performance. The purpose of benchmarking is to gain a competitive edge.
HISTORY, WORLDWIDE REACH
In a recent article, The (Toronto) Globe and Mail ("The Ins and Outs of Management Tools, " Gordon Pitts) reported that benchmarking was the third most used management tool in 1996, having risen from sixth place in 1993. This confirms the continuing, expanding, and intensifying interest in this improvement approach around the world.
Benchmarking and the search for best practices have had a wave-like movement across the globe. It was picked up and embraced by Europe within years of its significant use in the USA. What has been astounding, however, is the intensity with which it has been pursued in the Asia/Pacific area. Likewise, there has been somewhat of a lag in application in the South and Central Americas and in Canada. But, more importantly, this trend shows that this business improvement approach can, in fact, be successfully applied everywhere. This should serve to motivate organizations, around the globe, to learn from each other and bring benchmarking, worldwide, up to an exemplary level of expertise and application.
There is now a continuing interest and high demand for case studies of successful benchmarking investigations. This demand is second only to the preliminary interest that organizations have in finding performance data. Once the organization understands what the benchmark data reveal about where they stand and the magnitude of the gap, there is intense follow-on interest in what best practices will close the gap. That information and insight is usually revealed in case studies as shown in Figure 1. There are 35 case studies among my three books. They are a rich source of quick learning.
CURRENT DRIVING INITIATIVES
Today benchmarking is an essential ingredient in strategic planning and operational improvement. Long-range strategies if not survival require organizations to continuously change and adapt to the known marketplace of today and the expected market of tomorrow to remain competitive and deliver on today's imperatives of more, better, faster, cheaper (Figure 2). To energize and motivate its people, an organization must:
● believe there is a need for change, ● determine what you want to change, and ● create a picture of how you want to look after the change.
Read all. . .
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Robert C. Camp is President of the Global Benchmarking Network, an affiliation of 20 benchmarking competency centers around the world. For eleven years, he served on the Executive Committee of the Council of Logistics Management and was President in 1993.
He has over 30 years' experience in supply chain management. He has been recognized four times by Xerox for his leadership in benchmarking, and he is cited in The International Who's Who in Quality.
He holds a Bachelor degree in civil engineering from Cornell University and a Masters degree in business administration from Cornell University - Johnson Graduate School of Management. He earned a Doctorate in logistics and operations research from the Pennsylvania State University. He has written many articles and to date has 3 books on the subject.
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