What is benchmarking?
Benchmarking became popular as part of Total Quality Management (TQM). Employees of one company would visit other companies and compare various processes in those companies with the same process in their own. Some people felt that these interactions gave them valuable insights that helped them to optimize their business processes. Others felt that they were expensive field trips that distracted people from the business of solving their own problems. Most companies are involved in software development. This became a natural process to benchmark. Furthermore, techniques like function point analyses allow people to attempt to do quantitative comparisons between companies. The advantages of these comparisons are obvious. IS departments can get an advanced look at the impact of moving to new technologies. They can pinpoint problems in their own processes. Unfortunately, there are difficulties.
Benchmarking became popular as part of Total Quality Management (TQM). Employees of one company would visit other companies and compare various processes in those companies with the same process in their own. Some people felt that these interactions gave them valuable insights that helped them to optimize their business processes. Others felt that they were expensive field trips that distracted people from the business of solving their own problems. Most companies are involved in software development. This became a natural process to benchmark. Furthermore, techniques like function point analyses allow people to attempt to do quantitative comparisons between companies. The advantages of these comparisons are obvious. IS departments can get an advanced look at the impact of moving to new technologies. They can pinpoint problems in their own processes. Unfortunately, there are difficulties. Despite volumes of generally accepted accounting practices, comparing the financial statements of
Benchmarking is a long-proven process of measuring the performance of one enterprise against a set of similar enterprises. The intent is to improve your performance by modeling the best in class approaches of the comparison group. Traditionally benchmarking exercises used small numbers of comparison companies and were snapshots in time, leading to incomplete and obsolete data in short order. Country Club Benchmarking (CCB) applies the benchmarking model to the country club segment in a more effective manner by aggregating a large number of clubs and an always current database of comparison data.
