Traditional benchmarking has measured a business against industry and internal standards to highlight areas of strength and weakness. It makes a valuable contribution to an owner’s or president’s business perspective by allowing results to be compared, but falls short of explaining why the variances occur or what to do about them.
Our unique method includes these comparisons, but more importantly compares processes and evaluates more specific criteria such as:
- how sales are made
- how waste is controlled
- how supervisors are developed
- how employees are recruited and trained
This is invaluable because even though companies have enough similarity in key business areas to benefit from information regarding what is working best for others, each company is unique enough to require factoring in its particular operating details.
Our process benchmarking focuses on or uncovers many of the barriers to implementation, going beyond the mere identification of potential to provide insight into the steps necessary to reach it.
Our research has revealed that there are many determinants of success for any given area of a business. They include clarification of the following:
- Defining Objectives
- Developing Strategic Plans
- Assigning Accountability
- Monitoring and Measurement Methods
- Systematically Reviewing Progress and Making Necessary Corrections
Any business process also requires tradeoffs in accuracy, speed, efficiency, feedback, and overall costs. These vary greatly since entrepreneurs have different objectives for their companies. For example, are you building for the future, do you want cash flow quickly, or are you more interested in improving work-life balance?
Measuring how the most successful businesses make these tradeoffs, combined with the benefits of an experienced and objective outside perspective, can result in the identification of specific strategies for a given company and immediate results.
