Вы находитесь на странице: 1из 3

BENCHMARKING AND BEST PRACTICES

Cathy Hill Director, Business Development American Productivity & Quality Center Houston, TX

SUMMARY
This presentation will discuss best practices and benchmarking and how to get started with your own improvement effort. It will review denitions used by APQC members and explain why, how, and when to use benchmarking and best practices. Finally, this presentation will provide information on some of the tools and methodologies available.

KEY WORDS
benchmarking, best practices, secondary research

INTRODUCTION
Founded in 1977 by Dr. Jack Grayson, the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) has evolved over the past 23 years into a membership-based, nonprot organization providing information on best practices and quality. Our mission is to work with people in organizations around the world to improve productivity and quality by the following: 1. Discovering, researching, and understanding emerging and effective methods of improvement. 2. Broadly disseminating our ndings through education, advisory, and information services. 3. Connecting individuals with one another and with the knowledge and tools they need to improve. Over the years, we have been involved with the White House Conference on Productivity, administration of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and white collar measurement. In 1992 APQC and 86 companies, from both the public and private sector, joined to create the International Benchmarking Clearinghouse to bring people together to provide tools, information, and support to maximize their potential with benchmarking and best practices. Heres a summary of what our members have learned about implementing benchmarking and best practices into their organizations.

WHAT ARE BEST PRACTICES?


Benchmarking helps a business focus on how to improve a process by exploiting best practices, not best performances. A best practice may not be the same for every organization because each has its own culture, technology, and resources. Best practices are those that have produced superior results. They actually drive best performance; therefore, it is the best practice that should be adapted to t your organization. If an organization studies only best performance, it will miss learning important strategic, operational, and nancial information that could improve the process even more.

715

716

ASQs 54th Annual Quality Congress Proceedings

APQC denes benchmarking as the process of identifying, understanding, and, wherever possible, adapting the best practices or techniques used by other organizations that may help your own organization to improve its performance. In todays fast-paced world of business, it is essential to continuously improve performance to ensure survival. When we think of our business operations, we like to think of them as straight-line functions that bring our goods to market and produce prots for the company. Our key business processes cross over our functions, which leads to products and services and eventually prots. In reality, our business processes often look like a convoluted path from many disjointed functions that may eventually reach its goal, but not in an optimal manner. With benchmarking and best practices, we can straighten the disjointed lines in our process, thus improving company prots and customer satisfaction. In an ever changing marketplace, nding and adapting best practices is no longer an optionit is a necessity for organizations that strive to remain competitive. Grayson once said A nation with a lag in the productivity race will be assigned a new position in the world economy, one commensurate with its mediocre productivity performance. The same can be said in the business world. There are several reasons an organization may decide to engage in benchmarking including: It prevents you from starting from scratch, where another organization has already developed a process; there is no use in wasting time, money, and resources. It enables the transfer of tacit knowledge; explicit knowledge can only take you so far. It creates a sense of urgency and accelerates change by using tested and proven practices. It helps identify performance gaps between your organization and others. It helps the organization develop and set performance goals for its employees to achieve. It helps to establish realistic objectives. It encourages employees to be continuously innovative. It creates a better understanding of your industry. Because it is a process of continuous learning, benchmarking will emphasize sensitivity to the changing needs of your customers. While there are many reasons that a company may decide to benchmark, overall there is one objective performance improvement. One of the rst things you will need in order to start benchmarking in your own organization is total commitment, not only from each employee, but most importantly from senior management. Benchmarking will work best if senior management acquires a deep understanding of the process. When senior managers understand the benchmarking process, they are able to make better-informed decisions. Without your commitment, benchmarking will not be successfulyou must lead by example. Involvement is key, and everyone must feel as if they are contributing to the overall improvement of the organization. There are several recommendations senior management can employ to foster successful benchmarking including: First, tie the benchmarking effort to the strategic initiatives of the organization. This gives meaning to the study and will provide a common goal for your employees. Second, involve the process owners. Without their support, the change initiative will not move forward. With their support, they will become the champions of that change. Understand your own process. It is difcult to learn from another process if you do not know how yours works. Benchmark inside and outside. Look internally because there may be untapped knowledge oating around, and look externally in an attempt to innovate or think out of the box. Looking for improvement outside of your organization will give you a better understanding of your position in your industry. Focus on best practicesthey drive best performances. Set high goals, but make sure they are realistic. Aim aheadit will give your employees a goal and your company longevity. Develop a process and implement your ndings. Organizations often benchmark a process but do not follow through. Then, when performance is measured, the benchmarking effort is considered a failure. But it is not a failure. The failure was in not implementing the ndings. The next piece your organization needs to have in place to ensure a successful benchmarking study is an effective benchmarking model. There are many models available. You can study them and choose the best t for your project. As your organization continues to benchmark, you will probably customize a model aligned to your organizations culture.

ASQs 54th Annual Quality Congress Proceedings

717

APQC uses a four-phase model for developing a benchmarking studyplan, collect, analyze, and adapt. There is not a set time frame for each phase; it will depend on the topic, scope, and depth of the study. 1. The rst phase is to plan. First, you must select the benchmarking team and then establish the scope of the study. Next, you must determine your process performance level and begin to identify potential partners. You must examine your own process thoroughly before you can determine which other organizations you will ask to be best-practice partners. To identify potential partners, you will need to complete secondary research. Eighty percent of the information you need to know is in the public domainand much of that is accessible via the World Wide Web. You will also want to look at what other organizations are doing. You do need to remember there are some limitations to secondary research, such as the inability to access proprietary information, the possibility of obtaining stale data, and uncertainty about the accuracy and truthfulness of some information. 2. Once you have identied the scope and determined your best-practice partners, you will enter the information collection phase. Usually a database will be developed to store information collected from surveysthis is your quantitative information. Site visits are suggested to collect qualitative information, so you can actually see why your best-practice partner is so successful at that particular process. This will enable you to identify current practices, which may need to be revisited, or view opportunities for improvement. 3. You will now enter the analysis phase. A detailed analysis will enable you to compare the quantitative results of your organizations process with that of your best-practice partner. Gaps will be identied, and the benchmarking team will then be able to develop a process to close those gaps and adapt their techniques to t your process. Thus, the efciency and effectiveness of your process will improve. Participation in organizations such as APQC, American Society for Quality (ASQ), and other associations will assist you in building long-term relationships with individuals from those organizations that will ultimately help reduce the cycle time in gathering information during the collection phase. 4. Finally, you will develop an implementation plan, implement the process, and monitor and report progress. It is important to recalibrate and recycle the study in order to learn from continuous improvement. Recently one of APQCs members shared the lessons he learned on his way to a successful benchmarking program. Mark Slagle, benchmarking specialist at Ford, rst became aware of and involved with benchmarking in 1991. From what he learned about benchmarking and what he saw being called benchmarking at Ford through the years, Slagle believed the company wasnt doing it as effectively as it could. Employees often werent involving the right process owners or creating focused study scopes, and there was a lot of industrial tourism. Many times, study teams benchmarked companies because of their name only, not for outstanding processes. In Slagles mind, several external factors contributed to a turning point within Ford regarding benchmarkingthe advent of the Web, new benchmarking books and publications, and more and more success stories. Ford also credits a week-long benchmarking training program conducted by APQC. These sessions heightened benchmarking awareness throughout Ford.

CONCLUSION
Improvement requires change, and change requires a commitment. Benchmarking is a source of motivation for change. It will turn your organization into a learning organization by promoting a learning culture.

REFERENCE
Powers, Vicki. 1999. Ford Creates Clearinghouse, Virtual Network, Web Site to Support its Benchmarking Efforts. Benchmarking in Practice Issue 15, rst quarter. Copyright 2000 American Society for Quality. All rights reserved.

Вам также может понравиться