BENCHMARKING

There is a notion about benchmarking wherein you will just visit a company and try to imitate their practices and hope for improvement. Remember that benchmarking is a mutual learning process. You must ensure that both parties will learn from each other to attain its maximum benefits.

Suggestion for Benchmarking

Review the processes under study and identify your best practices as well as your practices that need improvement.

Come up with a list of prospective companies, whom you think has the best approaches to the process under study.

Take a look also on what your competitors are doing (not directly, of course) (I suggest you visit companies who won the “Philippine Quality Award”. They are open to those who want to benchmark their practices).

Come up with your benchmarking objectives and communicate it with your prospective companies so that they will know the purpose of your visit.

Make an itinerary of your visit and communicate it to the company in advance before the visit (one week lead time is preferred). You must list down in advance, all the process details needed to be observed.

During the visit, be able to share first your best practices so that they can also learn from you and brief them on your benchmarking objectives. Stick with the itinerary and note down all the observations based on the company’s actual practices. You must ensure that the objectives are met before you leave the company.

After the visit, compare your practices against the companies you’ve visited. It is important that you have a judgment criteria on its applicability whether you will adopt the process 100%, modify the process to suit you own, or stick with you own process and find some other ways to improve.

Implement the best applicable practices and monitor the results.

Don’t forget to thank the companies you have benchmarked and report to them the improvement you have made based on their inputs.

After a series of continual improvements, repeat step 1.

COURTESY OF PARENG RAMSEL