BENCHMARK

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Benchmarking for start-ups is a A useful tool for comparing and improving the performance of a new company against its competitors or market leaders. It is a process of comparing a company's business practices and processes with those of other companies in the same or similar industries. The main objective of benchmarking is to identify best practices, opportunities for improvement and solutions to the challenges faced by a company.

BENCHMARKING

In the case of a new company, benchmarking can be particularly valuable because it can help the company to:

• Identify effective practices and processes in the market.
• Assess your own performance in relation to your competitors or market leaders.
• Find areas for improvement and opportunities for growth.
• Learn from the mistakes and successes of other companies to avoid costly mistakes and accelerate your own success.
• Identify trends and changes in the market.

To perform benchmarking in a new company, the following steps should be followed:

1. Identify the key processes that you want to benchmark. These may include human resource management, supply chain, marketing and advertising strategy, quality management, among others.
2. Identify market leaders and/or direct competitors to be compared.
3. Collect relevant information and data from the selected companies.
4. Analyse the information gathered and compare it with the company's own processes and practices.
5. Identify opportunities for improvement and establish an action plan to implement best practices.

It is important to remember that benchmarking, does not mean copying or imitating the practices of other companies, but rather using the information collected to improve the company's own processes and practices and to develop a competitive advantage (+).

Benchmarking for mature companies

Benchmarking, or comparative analysis, is a business management tool that consists of comparing and analysing a company's processes, practices and results with those of other companies in the same or similar sectors, in order to identify best practices and opportunities for improvement. The aim is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the company, to learn from the experiences and strategies of competitors, and to apply this knowledge to optimise its own management and performance. Benchmarking can be applied to different areas of the company, such as production, marketing, innovation, logistics, personnel management, among others.

The benchmarking is a continuous process of benchmarking the products, services or work processes of leading companies.. To compare them with those of your own company and then make improvements and implement them. It is not about copying what your competitors are doing. If not from tond out what the leaders are doing to implement it in your company by adding improvements. If we take as a reference those who stand out in the area we want to improve and we study their strategies, methods and techniques. In order to subsequently improve and adapt them to our company, we will achieve a high level of competitiveness.

Types of benchmarking:

While it is always about comparing and learning to improve, there are different ways of applying benchmarking depending on where it is done. The bibliography offers different classifications from which three main areas can be distinguished.

• COMPETITIVE BENMARCHING

Transformed into science by the Xerox Corporation. It compares products, services and practices with the best competitors and is essential for proper market positioning.

• INTERNAL BENMARCHING

It compares results between homogeneous teams or functions within the same organisation. In order to identify benchmarks and find out which practices enable the best results to be achieved. This activity not only helps to get to know each other better, but also to set general objectives supported by the identified practices.

• EXTERNAL BENMARCHING

Its objective is the search for best practices based on the comparison of our processes and their results, with respect to recognised organisations, whether or not they are in our sector. But with which we are not in competition. This is perhaps the most innovative and relatively easy type of benchmarking.

STAGES OF BENCHMARKING

To properly design and carry out a benchmarking process in your company, I recommend the following steps: planning, data collection, analysis, action and follow-up.

• PLANNING

The main objective of this first stage is to plan the research to be carried out. At this stage we have to answer three questions:

• What do I want to measure? All research must have a reason, and it must be related to an area of our company that we want to improve.
• Who am I going to measure? To answer this second question we have to consider what type of benchmarking we are going to follow: competitive, internal or functional. Once we have made the decision, we will know whether we will benchmark ourselves against our own department or against a company from within or outside the sector.
• How are we going to do it? In order to carry out the project we have to create a team to be responsible for the organisation and management of the project.

• DATA

Data collection is fundamental to benchmarking, and the success or failure of the whole process will depend to a large extent on it. We can obtain data from different sources: internal, professional associations or own research among others.

• ANALYSIS

Once we have collected the necessary information, we have to analyse the elements that cause the differences between our company and the companies studied, in order to identify opportunities for improvement.

Once we have identified the magnitude of the differences, it is time to propose the improvements we are going to carry out. It should be borne in mind that we will only select those improvements that, in terms of size, resources and infrastructure, are the most appropriate for our needs. feasible (+) carried out by our company.

• ACTION

The next step after analysing the information and having selected the aspects of reference in the selected companies, it is time to adapt them to our company but always implementing improvements.

In other words, after analysing the information and identifying the best aspects of the companies we have selected, we take them as points of reference to adapt them to our company, but always adding some improvement or some advantage that will bring value to our clients.

• MONITORING AND IMPROVEMENT

At this last stage a report should be made with all the salient information from the process. This will help to take up the work in subsequent projects. The idea is that it should become a sustained company exercise to adopt continuous improvement.