Benchmarking is a common practice and sensible exercise to establish baselines, define best practices, identify growth opportunities and creates a competitive environment within the organization.
A primary advantage of benchmarking is that it sets the foundation of performance improvement.
Simply put, benchmarking is a process to discover what is the best standard of performance seen in a specific company, by a particular competitor or by a completely different industry.
Integrating bench-marking into your organization can result in valuable data that encourages discussion and creates new ideas to improve processes and practices as well as relationships with providers. In bench-marking the data is what is most important! Documenting vendors, rates, terms and conditions to further compare and improve is a benefit of bench-marking and a feature of a vendor management solution.
Bench-marking is one of a manager’s best tools for determining whether the company is performing particular functions and activities efficiently, whether its costs and rates are in line with those of competitors, and whether its internal activities and business processes need improvement. Bench-marking helps organizations to stay in sync with the market and customer needs. Thus, bench-marking these needs and then taking corrective actions is not simply emulating competitors. Rather it is the process of understanding what top standard is, and making changes within the organization in order to meet & transcend that standard.
A benchmarking strategy can:
• Clearly identify specific areas of opportunity
• Validate assumptions
• Prioritize improvement opportunities
• Set performance expectations
• Monitor company performance
• Manage change using vendor management tools and analytics
• Improve understanding of the real opportunities and their priority
• Minimizes resistance to change and support for action
• Fosters a spirit of enthusiasm to do better than the external benchmark
• Promotes discussion based on data rather than assumptions or emotion
How benchmarketing Increases Sales and Profits
Benchmarking enables managers to determine what the best practice is, to prioritize opportunities for improvement and to enhance performance relative to internal and external customer expectations. It also helps managers to understand the most accurate and efficient means of performing an activity, to learn how lower costs are actually achieved, and to take action to improve a company’s cost competitiveness. As a result, bench-marking has been used in many companies as a tool for obtaining a competitive advantage. A company that uses bench-marking to improve its functions, operations, products and services may enjoy increases in sales and profits. These efforts are likely to increase sales due to improved processes, efficiency among departments and improved product quality. Companies that operate more efficiently can drastically lower their expenses.
Benchmarking has several other benefits as well:
Improved Quality: Benchmarking helps organizations to continuously improve the quality of their products & services. Organizations observe the current standard, and then try to surpass that.
Better performance: Benchmarking helps organizations overcome complacency. They continuously strive to improve their performance standards in order to stay relevant in the market.
Cost efficiency: Bench-marking provides organization with valuable data on the latest vendor trends, technology, and processes followed in the business world. These are aimed at increasing productivity while reducing cost. For example, a manufacturing company might learn about a certain machine used by its competitor, which can do the work for five workers. This company might also adopt similar technology to lower its labor cost.
Prioritizing areas of improvement: While organizations understand the importance of continuous development, they might be unsure at times about where to start the improvement from. Bench-marking helps organizations to identify the areas where the gap between their standard and that of the industry is the largest. This helps organizations to prioritize the areas that they need to work on.
Leveraging strength areas: Benchmarking can also throw light on the areas where the organization is doing much better than what is observed in the market.
Our Vendor Management Solution (VMS) is a discipline that enables businesses to not only cut costs but also: control expenses, drive service excellence and mitigate risks…while gaining increased visibility and value from their vendors. Through LIMITLESS’s on-line software overall vendor management, as well as – vendor expense management, is accomplished by giving you absolute visibility into your vendors and spend. No matter what the vendor or type of service they provide – companies can have a comprehensive view into their: services, contracts, rates, terms, conditions and spends through this sophisticated web-based solution.
If you have questions about any of our VMS benefits contact us today at 866-504-4050 to learn more about our Vendor Management Solutions.