Benchmarking as a Competitive Advantage

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Benchmarking as a Competitive Advantage

Juran Global Our expertise has been developed over more than six decades of real-world experience, and our methods are universal and have been applied in nearly every industry and culture around the world. Our mission is to prepare a new generation of business leaders who will build greater prosperity for our society through the application of the operational excellence methods and values of Dr. Joseph M. Juran in the context of new technologies, advanced applications, and expanding lessons learned. We want to be seen as trusted advisers, enabling global leaders to achieve measureable, breakthrough results.

Benchmarking as a Competitive Advantage Benchmarking is a strategic tool for continuous improvement in highly competitive markets. It reveals the strengths and weaknesses in an organization and focuses attention on the key areas for performance improvement. It can identify opportunities to improve both effectiveness and efficiency. The assessment is a learning process that isn’t quick or easy, but invaluable in helping your company’s performance improve or maintain. Benchmarking offers apple-to-apple comparisons, and cuts through the fiction in the marketplace. This assessment is vital to achieving targets and maintaining industry performance. At Juran, the process is broken into seven steps across two phases. The phases focus on data collection and, later, implementation. Companies can either participate in any of our multi-company benchmarking consortia, many of which are run on an annual basis, or they can simply benchmark themselves against the wealth of data held in our databases. Alternatively, companies can commission tailored benchmarking studies, internal or external, designed to their own specific scope requirements.

When Do You Need Benchmarking? Benchmarking is best applied in three different areas: 1. Design and Planning. Benchmarking will help identify goals to design or to improve upon. You will learn from best practices, set achievable goals, and design better processes. 2


1. Control and Compliance. An assessment will identify means to hold the gains at benchmark levels. You will obtain data for benchmarking and continuous comparison, and hold gains made. 2. Breakthrough Improvement. Benchmarking will improve performance to significantly superior levels. You will gain an external perspective, identify performance gaps, prioritize improvement projects, and sustain results.

Why Should You Benchmark? The management practice of benchmarking has been around since the mid-1980s. Not everything from the 80s is still in style, but benchmarking has stuck around for a reason: it works. Benchmarking offers these results:  Explore the Vision. The assessment ensures your company’s or project’s vision is useful, and it will help you define that vision. For example, if your vision is to sell 800 widgets a week, but the top competitor in the marketplace is only selling 100 widgets a week, then you might want to revise your vision to something more attainable.  Assess Current Performance. Are you living up to the vision now? If your goal is to sell 100 widgets a week, can you produce those 100 widgets? How many are you producing right now?  Set Goals and Plans. Now that you have a goal in mind that takes into account the external and internal reality, you can plan on how to attain it.

 Implement Improvements. Knowing best practices informs how to implement your new goals.  Sustain Results. Now that you’re outselling the highest competitor in the widget market, you’ll need to continually monitor best practices so you can stay ahead.

Benchmarking Programs Juran offers different benchmarking programs to suit your company’s needs.  Knowledge Management Benchmarking. This program reports on risks associated with your organization’s ability to act quickly when anticipating change, solving problems, making decisions and innovating. At Juran, we do this by exploring the balance between the existence of your organization’s information and knowledge and your ability to acquire, embed, share, develop and deploy it.  Knowledge Management Benchmarking Metrics Model. The program will report on your performance, in terms of capability and identify the gaps in your capabilities that lie between you and achieving world-class performance. If you are not assessing your performance capability, or if you don’t know how you are performing, then you are at risk of losing market position and value.  Other Types of Benchmarking. Juran can create benchmarking programs that are tailored to address the specific requirements of our clients. These may be internal benchmarking studies, designed to compare the relative performance of different areas

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within a single organization. This is of particular value to larger organizations.

The Juran 7-Step Benchmarking Process© Our assessment process provides a reliable, systematic approach for all of our benchmarking programs. There are two phases over which the seven steps take place: Positioning Analysis and Learning from Best Practices. Positioning Analysis 

Step 1: Planning and Project Set-up

During this step, a kickoff meeting is held with stakeholders. During that meeting, stakeholders will review and agree upon purpose, scope, methodology, and schedule for participation. It is our participants who ultimately decide which metrics are to be included in the analysis. 

Step 2: Data Collection and Normalization

This benchmarking step marks completions of a data collection document by all industry participants. All data is then thoroughly validated and normalized (i.e. comparing applesto-apples) using a variety of methods. At Juran, we analyze the data and prepare a detailed written report of the benchmarking results, including a performance gap analysis for each participant. The comprehensive report typically includes more than 200 key performance indicators examining all

aspects of your processing facility’s operational performance.  Step 3: Analysis and Identification of Best Practices  Step 4: Present Report Following the benchmarking analysis and issuing of the report, Juran hosts a Best Practice Forum, exclusive to the benchmarking participants, whereby companies share their best working practices. Learning from the Best Practices  Step 5: Establish Learning from Best Practices  Step 6: Improvement Actions Planning and Implementation Juran facilitates Action Planning Workshops for each participant, designed to identify the primary reasons for performance gaps identified in the benchmarking and make initial steps towards improved performance.  Step 7: Institutionalize Learning

What Works and What Doesn’t Benchmarking is all about learning, but it’s not about the blame game. The assessment is about improving performance, but not dwelling on the past. Benchmarking should be focused on a specific project or goal. For example, if your widget factory is looking at an expansion, now might be the time for a benchmarking assessment. For best results, use an independent, reputable facilitator to conduct the assessment. This will help you divine fact from fiction, normalize data, and provide clear definitions.

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Juran Global Assessments Organization Health Check: With more than 1,000 assessments completed, we can jump start your journey to becoming a world-class organization. The Organization Health Check provides a quick qualitative review or “fitness test” against industry best practices. COPQ Assessment: The cost of poor quality is the difference between the costs of a perfectly performing process and versus the actual costs. The Juran COPQ assessment results in the quantification of the potential dollars that are lost due to ineffective and inefficient processes. Employee Engagement: We focus on the practices, shared mindset, and ethos of your organization to identify the willingness and ability of employees to contribute to the success of the company and the extent to which employees put discretionary effort into their work in the form of extra time, brainpower, and energy. Quality Management System (ISO): A quality management system allows you to maintain stable internal processes. It enables quick adaptation to new customer demands, all the while delivering superior products and services in an ever-changing market. To learn more about our assessments, or to take the Organization Health Check, please visit our website at http://juran.com, or contact us at: Juran Global 800.338.7726 [email protected] http://www.juran.com/contact-us Copyright © 2016 Juran Global. All rights reserved.