BUSINESS ASSIGNMENT

Business Assignment



Business Assignment

How a company could use benchmarking to measure themselves against their competitors?

A1: Today companies have to compete not only with companies in the same region, but present an increased competition with other firms elsewhere and countries, the former due to globalization that has been presented. It is therefore, above which companies must find ways and formulas that move towards a productivity and higher quality to be competitive. One of these tools or formulas is Benchmarking (Ahmed & Zairi, 2006, pp.123-145).

Benchmarking got introduced as a tool for improving business practices in order to become more competitive in a market increasingly difficult; however there are aspects and categories of benchmarking is important to check.

Internal Benchmarking

In most large companies with numerous divisions or international there comparable functions in distinct operating units. One of the investigations easier benchmarking is to compare these internal operations. Be counted easily with data and information and confidentiality issues exist. Data and information can be as broad and comprehensive as desired. This first step in investigations of benchmarking is an excellent base to discover not only differences of interest but also focus on critical issues to be faced or might be of interest to understand the practices from external investigations (Mark & Czarnecki, 1999, pp.234-255). They can also help define the scope of an external study.

Competitive Benchmarking

The products are direct competitors against whom it is obvious to perform the benchmarking. They met or should with all evidence of comparability. In short, any investigation of benchmarking must show what are the comparative advantages and disadvantages between direct competitors. One of the most important in this type of research to consider is the fact it can be really difficult to get information on the operations of competitors. Information may be impossible because it got patented and is the basis of competitive advantage of the company.

Functional Benchmarking

It is necessary to focus only on the direct product competitors. There is great potential to identify functional competitors or industry leaders to use in benchmarking even if they are in industries dissimilar. This type of benchmarking has proven to be productive because it encourages interest in research and data sharing, because there is no problem of confidentiality of information between disparate businesses but there is also a natural interest in understanding the practices elsewhere (Ralph & Horne, 2008, pp.99-110). Moreover, in this type of research is beyond the syndrome of "not invented here” got often found when conducting a benchmarking with the same industry.

Generic Benchmarking

Some functions or business processes are the same with independence in the dissimilarities of industries, such as order fulfilment. The benefit of this form of benchmarking, the purest, is that you can find methods and practices that did not get implemented in the investigator's particular industry. Such research has the potential to reveal the best of the best practices. What better proof of the possibility to implement it could be obtained that the fact that the technology that did got tested and is in use ...