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Benchmarking
Benchmarking has been a common terminology
in many organizations whenever they seek opportunity for improvement or
sometimes a magic answer to their crisis . However, many has not taken
benchmarking beyond discussion in a meeting room.
This TQM article is about how the I dealt with Benchmarking in TQM
implementation in my scope of work.
Benchmarking may be considered as a way to reference a good organization.
This thought would happen when an organization is seeking for a solution to
their problem normally big enough to handle themselves. During the initiative start up of a major initiative such as implementing TQM, we often asked;
how to start to implement TQM. How long will be the TQM journey? You may come across someone may suggest; why not we Benchmark other
successful TQM organization? Sounds like a great idea! ! Many would have
agreed and got
excited about it. But the question
often asked is what exactly is Benchmarking? and What to benchmark?
Benchmarking as a Strategy
So, if benchmarking is used as a Strategy in Implementing TQM, then you need to understand what is TQM and what it takes to
succeed implementing it. Fortunately, there are vast knowledge about TQM available in many
resource such as references books from TQM Guru's, Internet articles and
TQM Case Studies
& Articles Directory
etc.
In begin with, you need to be aware that TQM is operate on several TQM principles, to name a few:-
1. Leadership commitment
2. Customer Focus
3. Employee Involvement
4. Continuous Improvement
What to Benchmark?
Knowing the TQM
principles, you need to have some understand about these TQM Principles.
Then it will be a good starting point to address what to benchmark issue.
Once you have the list of TQM Principles, you may pick one or more to start with your benchmarking initiatives.
How to Benchmark?
Now that you have
decided what to benchmark, the next obvious question to ask is how to
benchmark. Well, there are several approaches you may take to address the how to
benchmark issue. Firstly, you need to decided what are some data easily
available? Can you get access to these data? Sometimes we also asked how
accurate are these data.
Based on the
Balanced Scorecard concept, some of the common and easily available data are listed below:-
* Financial Results such as Profitability, Earning per Share, Return on
Investment etc
* Customer or Market Result such as Turnover, Market share, Customer
complaints etc
* Process Result such as Production cost, Delivery cycle time,
Quality Level etc
* Organization Growth Results such as Technical competency, Knowledge
workforce, Innovaton etc
While some of these data are fairly easy to obtain, some needed extra effort,
You have to decided what data you need to benchmark, You need to recognize that
these are the outcome of the effort put in by an organization. What you
normally cannot see is the process of getting these results hence it makes Benchmarking a
challenging task. Therefore effort should be put in to benchmark the process of getting these results.
In summary, while there are limitations in Benchmarking, it must be noted
that the Benchmarked results are real and proven. To benchmark the
result is the starting point to drive for process improvement. Execution is
the key to make benchmarking a reality. The end result is a systematic way to implement TQM
I invite you to view online
How to use SWOT Analysis in Strategic Planning
Click here to enter
TQM Case Studies
& Articles Directory.
About the author : Dr. L M Foong-PhD, is a TQM practitioner. He
publishes TQM articles, ebooks, case studies, trainer manual, facilitator
guides and presentation slides. He can be contacted at
http://tqmcasestudies.com/ContactUs.html
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