Benchmark

Benchmarking and planning

Introduction

With the world’s economic develops, the competition is becoming much more fierce. And there comes to the survival of the fittest in the modern business. Then people started to ask why they can success and why they can gain more than the others. As a result, they started to learn from the successors------there comes the idea benchmarking. And nowadays, every industry area has its own benchmarking models, and much more companies try to seek to their own benchmarking and planning system, which in order to help them have an advantage in the competition. But what is benchmarking in earth? How to use benchmarking in business and how benchmarking help the company achieve success?

Section 1------The conception of benchmarking  

‘Benchmarking is the process of comparing one's business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and/or best practices from other industries.’(Wikipedia 2010) It usually dimensioned by quality, time and cost. Briefly speaking, benchmarking is doing things better, faster, cheaper and greener. For example, in baseball, they may benchmark the seven consecutive World Series Championships winner New York Yankees.

There is another definition about benchmarking, a little different with the previous one. ‘Benchmarking is the process of measuring an organization's internal processes then identifying, understanding, and adapting outstanding practices from other organizations considered to be best-in-class.’(Management help. Org 2010). This definition is focus on the internal company and how the organization get much more efficiency and effectiveness. Meanwhile, benchmarking is a proactive strategy; it can provide a high level of understanding regarding process improvement and customer expectations. It can help the organization search for the best practices and an understanding of how those are achieved. (Eskimo.com 2010)

Obviously, benchmarking is a management tool that is being applied...