Benchmarking

BENCHMARKING

Benchmarking is a process of measuring the performance of a company’s products, services, or processes against those of another business considered to be the best in the industry, “best in class.” The point of benchmarking is to identify internal opportunities for improvement. By studying companies with superior performance, breaking down what makes such superior performance possible, and then comparing those processes to how your business operates, you can implement changes that will yield significant improvements.

That might mean tweaking a product’s features to more closely match a competitor’s offering, or changing the scope of services you offer, or installing a new customer relationship management (CRM) system to enable more personalized communications with customers.

There are two basic kinds of improvement opportunities: continuous and dramatic. Continuous improvement is incremental, involving only small adjustments to reap sizeable advances. Dramatic improvement can only come about through reengineering the whole internal work process.

STEP-BY-STEP BENCHMARKING

Benchmarking is a simple, but detailed, five-step process:

• Choose a product, service, or internal department to benchmark.
• Determine which best-in-class companies you should benchmark against, which organizations you’ll compare your business to.
• Gather information on their internal performance, or metrics.
• Compare the data from both organizations to identify gaps in your company’s performance.
• Adopt the processes and policies in place within the best-in-class performers.

Benchmarking will point out what changes will make the most difference, but it’s up to you to actually put them in place.

In order to benchmark anything, you need to have quantitative data available to study. That means breaking down internal processes to calculate performance metrics. Quantify everything, because only quantifiable information can be accurately compared.

The vehicle benchmarking program considers 10 main attributes scoring up to 815 single criteria. The 10 main attributes are as follows:

- Performance
- Driveability
- Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)
- Sound / NVH
- RDE: CO2 / Real life fuel consumption
- Pollutant emissions
- Friction
- Thermal, energy management
- Vehicle dynamics, handling
- Ride Comfort

BENEFITS

In addition to helping companies become more efficient and profitable, benchmarking has other benefits, too, such as:

• Improving employee understanding of cost structures and internal processes
• Encouraging team-building and cooperation in the interests of becoming more competitive
• Enhancing familiarity with key performance metrics and opportunities for improvement company-wide

In essence, benchmarking helps employees understand how one small piece of a company’s processes or products can be the key to major success, just as one employee’s contributions can lead to a big win.

REQUIREMENT

Benchmark with presently available cars in the market for the following case.

Mr. D.S. Pughazhyendhii is a married man who lives in Bangalore which is a highly crowded city. His Family comprises five members including his wife, five-year-old boy, his father, and his mother. He visits his native place Madurai which is 500 kms away from Bangalore once in a month. Also, he will be using his car to commute to his office. His budget falls between 8 to 10 lakhs on road. Please suggest to him with options so that he will buy a good car for his family.

Note: Pughazhyendhii is fond of big cars

SUGGESTIBLE CARS

1. Kia Sonet
2. Hyundai Venue
3. Tata Nexon
4. Ford Eco Sport

COMPARISON OF ABOVE 4 CARS

In order to select a vehicle/car from the above 4 as mentioned by the selecting criteria, more confusion is there between the two-vehicle Ford Ecosport and Tata Nexon. As both the vehicle comes under a price bracket if 8 to 10 lakhs. Also, both cars have a seating capacity of 5 people and are preferred for city and highway rides as well, as both are having good safety ratings and dimension wise both are quite the same. However, Ecosport is having more ground clearance which is preferred for city rides. Also, fuel economy wise both are the same but the maintenance cost when compared, it is a ford which proves to be most economical and this is a good factor apart from safety, ground clearance and mileage.

So as a recommendation it is the Ford Figo which is recommended to the user from the specifications point of view.

to see excel sheet data please click here