Adopting an approach that helps your organization keep track of its activities over time is critical for the growth of any organization, just like having a healthy mind in a healthy body. To be best in class requires continuous measurement and calibration of the organization’s strategy in operations to guarantee its healthy state. Having an active benchmarking exercise is one factor that can help in the structuring of an organization for success. The very essence of benchmarking correlates the need for consistent improvement in business strategies, competitive advantage, and best-in-class results. Consistent measurement of processes and performance would create new opportunities and provide critical information required for building a long-term strategy and trajectory for growth.
According to David Blunkett,” To make sense of a world in which rapid change and globalization create genuine insecurity, we need benchmarks by which we can judge our actions and their long term impact. Benchmarking analysis is cut through implementing the best process, imbibing the best performance and the necessary strategy needed for the growth of the organization. Many organizations operating on best practices often see a need for continuous measurement of their businesses against their competitors in order to stay at the top. Nevertheless, benchmarking doesn’t entail copying your competitor, rather improving your business strategy through refined and tested processes employing internal policies.
Strategic Leadership as an agent of change
Good leadership quality is a necessity for the proper implementation and sustainability of a structured systematic benchmarking approach. The adoption of benchmarking must start from the top. Just like Alan Mulally, “Leadership is having a compelling vision, a comprehensive plan, relentless implementation and talented people working together”. Accountability for benchmarking is a responsibility for all sector in the organizations and must be influenced by the top.
In breaching the actual performance of an organization and globally verifiable performance, every sector in the organization must view best practices as a focus on continuous improvement. Remember, continuous improvement and leadership are absolutely necessary to each other. On this note, management must be innovative, strategic, exhibit quality commitment, and ensure availability of resources towards the growth of the organization. Management has a major role to play to ensure that benchmarking is performed not just at the external level but also at the internal level to help improve the performance of staff in every sector of the industry.
Benchmarking a tool for continuous Improvement
In the bid to achieve a best-in-class result, benchmarking is very significant and also influences the growth of any business. Research has proven that benchmarking is best practice-oriented and aligned as a unit of the continuous improvement program. This is to say that consistent benchmarking is a lifetime learning process. Every organization must strive for continuous improvement instead of perfection. Because it is necessary to recognize the fact that learning is a lifetime goal and a lifetime experience.
While benchmarking, every organization has a benchmark, and this benchmark often depends on both the quantitative measure to guarantee the best result and the qualitative measure to provide the metric-based outcome. Achieving best-in-class results in an organization entails proper planning, accurate analysis, adequate implementation of actions, and constant review of processes, strategy, and performance at various levels.
Knowing that benchmarking is a completely objective process, the basic approach taken is defining your business strategy and measuring with data against competitors. As the end result of the exercise, you would have discovered new ways of achieving business goals and set targets for the future. Benchmarking is not a means to implement the short-term solution but focuses on building a long-term sustainable approach to improve your business.
The process of benchmarking is not easily implemented and to achieve excellence an organization must gain mastery over certain challenges. In searching for the right information’s most organizations will find it difficult to lease out information that could be detrimental to the organization, or the fear of losing competitive advantage and the exposure of organization weakness.