Types of Benchmarking

Benchmarking can be defined as the management technique concerned with allowing businesses to establish measures of their performance. This allows them to analyze their efficiency and compare themselves to competitors and leading firms in their industry.
There are many types of benchmarking approaches, including

• Competitive benchmarking: benchmark performance or processes of one organization with its competitors.
• Customer service benchmarking: aimed at understanding, measuring and improving customer service using surveys, mystery shoppers, etc.
• Financial benchmarking: running a financial analysis and making a comparison of the results in order to process the firm's overall competitiveness, efficiency and productivity.
• Best practice benchmarking: similar to competitive benchmarking.
• Internal benchmarking: benchmark the performance or processes within a corporation, for example between business units.
• Functional benchmarking: benchmark a particular process within one company with the same process in another, similar company.
• Generic benchmarking: compare certain operations between unrelated industries.
• Collaborative benchmarking: carried out collaboratively by groups of companies.

Bestselling Benchmarking Books

The Curse of B.

According to Seth Godin, although it has its strong sides, we have gone too far in B. everything. He says B. causes stress and actually encourages us to be mediocre: the guys who invented the Mini (or the Hummer, for that matter) didn’t benchmark their way to the edges. Comparing themselves to other cars would never have created these fashionable exceptions. What really works is not having everything being up to spec… what works is everything being good enough, and one or two elements of a product or service being AMAZING. Do you agree with Godin?