Benchmarking – A Newbie’s Perspective
I’m new at Cornerstone Dynamics and new to the world of efficiency. Such being the case, I have much to learn about the business, including being knowledgeable about this month’s blog topic of benchmarking for business efficiency. Don’t get me wrong, I do have experience with benchmarking as it applies to the Meeting and Event Planning Industry (Stop/Start/Continue documents or event case studies anyone?). Yet it struck me that benchmarking for Business Efficiency is more involved than what I had been previously exposed to.
Typically, when faced with a new project or undertaking (in this case wrapping my head around benchmarking), my first step is to do a bit of research to fully understand the business at hand. I followed my usual path of online reading – thank you Google – and then took a secondary approach and spoke to the best resources available to me, my colleagues at CSD. What an eye opener! Speaking with Adriana Girdler made me understand just how involved benchmarking can be and how critical it is to undertake from a business strategy perspective.
What is Benchmarking for Business Efficiency? According to Merriam-Webster, to bench mark is “to study (such as a competitor’s product or business practices) in order to improve the performance of one’s own company.” Yes, this is the traditional definition of benchmarking. But benchmarking doesn’t necessarily require a competitor to be effective, it can be applied internally, evaluating the existing processes within one’s own company to create best practices for maximum business and strategic efficiency.
Although benchmarking may take time, capital and hard work to get a successful benchmarking project off of the ground, it’s important for businesses to benchmark so that improvements may be made and to learn from proven experiences, successes and processes. Without benchmarks in place, time and budget allotments are undoubtedly impacted as businesses look for a way to begin (sometimes blindly), continue or complete their projects. Let’s face it, that’s just not efficient. Benchmarking propels buy-in from senior management, keeps key stakeholders in the loop and most importantly, achieves agreement from all parties on how a project moves forward (best practices), including budgetary, resource and employee allocations.
Adriana wrote a great blog this month on Why Benchmarking Will Save Your Business Butt!, that is well worth a read. It was also one of the references that helped me to understand benchmarking for business efficiency and strategy – thank you Adriana.
In a nutshell, benchmarking is a boon to your business. It promotes efficiency, productivity and measurements/comparisons to help improve your business processes and strategies in the long run.
Does your business use benchmarking as an efficiency, productivity or strategic tool? If so, please share your story with us. Feel free to leave a comment below or shout out to us on Facebook or Twitter. Of course, you could always write your own blog post on the subject and share it with us… We’d love to read it!
