Benchmarking best practices

BENCHMARKING BEST PRACTICES By Larry Lapide This is an ongoing column in The Journal, which is intended to give a brief view on a potential topic of interest to practitioners of business forecasting. Suggestions on topics that you would like to see covered should be sent via email to llapide@mit.edu). My advice to those contemplating benchmarking is to make sure they don’t automatically assume that a simple apples-to-apples comparison can be made among organizations. Results from a benchmarking exercise require careful analysis to understand fully what can be gleaned from the information. This is especially the case when it comes to Business Process Benchmarking. (See my column in the Fall 2002 issue of the Journal of Business Forecasting that discusses this and the two others forms of benchmarking — internal and external benchmarking). Business Process Benchmarking entails managers visiting other companies for extended site visits to get an in-depth look at how they are doing things. In this way, they can learn about the best business processes that are in place at the other companies, with the intent of replicating them in some way. However, when it comes to trying ...