Benchmarking as a Best Practice in Industry Analysis

In a highly competitive business environment, benchmarking is critical for companies to improve their performance, drive digital transformation and grow.

If a business is to succeed, it is important to know:

• how well does it perform compared to its competitors?
• what can be done better?
• how to manage change to improve performance relative to the competition?
• where to start

Benchmarking – is a best practice search method that has several characteristics that determine its use. It is an ongoing process of looking for best practice, learning and applying that practice to achieve best results and sustainable competitive advantage. Benchmarking can be considered as a dynamic process of comparing selected areas or the overall strategy of the organization with the best practice achieved by other organizations from the same or completely different sector of activity.  It enables continuous improvement of organization and effectiveness of many company processes without waiting for evaluation of the results achieved by the company.

It can be successfully implemented at different levels of competitiveness: an enterprise, a sector/cluster, a region or the whole economy, facilitating the diagnosis and implementation of the best solutions affecting the building of competitive advantage. Many enterprises think they know where they stand in relation to other cluster entities and how advanced the digital transformation process is, but benchmarking is the only way to really assess whether an enterprise is a world-class organization, the best or just plain average in the area of digitalization.

Benefits:

• confident (reliable) results,
• clear result maps,
• efficient process,
• re-examination of benchmarking allows for real improvements in performance.

Strategic management tool enabling:

• monitoring different types of processes (related to digital and green transformation, for example) in a company – comparing business performance,
• comparing the company’s results with a selected reference group, i.e. determining the position in comparison with the base companies,
• detecting imperfections in the company’s operations and uncovering practices applied elsewhere that will make it possible to improve business performance,
• identification of strengths and weaknesses of the company,
• prepare a plan for implementing changes in order to achieve the best results,
• more objective and realistic view of your company,
• support decisions with figures.