Comparativeness to Competitiveness by Benchmarking

Benchmarking provides an increased awareness of products, costs, and processes that ensure effective plans are developed to deliver them. It is a comparative analysis route to competitive advantage. The constant external focus and testing of ideas, methods, practices, and their incorporation in plans and programs for their delivery is the single approach for ensuring long-term competitiveness. To become competitive, one must understand the competition. The focus on the direct product competitors is one focus of benchmarking. Benchmarking is the basis for developing a picture of how the operation should look after the change to attain superior competitive performance. In this fashion, it is a powerful way to marshal the energies of the operation to become competitive and to exceed competition. Benchmarking in its most thorough application goes beyond looking solely at competitors and uncovers the best practices whether they may exist, in any industry. The canvassing for proven practices and technology across a wide spectrum of industries is what brings ultimate competitiveness. A competitive leadership position means that process strengths have been capitalized on whether they have been practiced. The benchmarking process by its nature challenges the current way of doingbusiness by bringing in new ideas and practices from the outside. These new practices are used to build functional strategies and business plans from knowledge gained in benchmarking. They are later converted into commitments to resources and action plans in the budgeting cycle. This process of external view, findings, strategy formulation, and plan commitment is what ultimately results in becoming competitive. Often industries do not change until the pain of competition is felt severely. This approach is proven disastrous. By that time either life-threatening surgery has to be performed, or the lead-time to change never permitted catching up to the competitor’s pace. Benchmarking helps recognize the pain before it occurs. The principal way benchmarking does this is by basing a pro-forma, future, desired state picture on benchmark findings of industry best practices.