4 Ways to Improve Benchmarking Performance

In every Operational Excellence endeavor, benchmarking performance plays the critical role of indicating whether the continuous improvement activities are successful.

Benchmarking is the search for best practices, the ones that will lead to superior performance. Benchmarking is the setting of a performance standard, whether for manufacturing, SEO campaigns, call-center performance, and so on.

Establishing operating targets based on the best possible industry practices is important to long-term success. Here are four ways to improving benchmarking performance:

The four key steps of benchmarking:

1. Knowing your operation. You need to accurately assess your strengths and weaknesses.
2. Knowing your industry leaders or competitors. You must understand, and compare yourself to, the best practices in the industry and/or its leaders.
3. Incorporating the best. Learn from industry leaders and your competition. If they are strong in given areas, uncover why and how they got that way. Find best practices wherever they exist and do not hesitate to copy or modify and incorporate them in your own operation. Emulate their strengths.
4. Gain superiority. If careful investigations of best practices have been performed, and if the best of those best practices have been installed, then you will have incorporated the best of the best.

4 Ways to Improve Benchmarking Performance