It is an ongoing process through which you can use the products, services, or work processes of leading companies as references, compare them with the products, services, or work processes of your own company, and then make improvements and implementations.

It is not about copying what your competitors do, but about understanding the behavior of the leader to implement the competition in your company adding improvements. If we take as a reference those who stand out in the field that we want to improve and study their strategies, methods, and technologies in order to improve and adapt them to our company in the future, we will achieve a high level of competitiveness.

To correctly design and execute the benchmarking process in your company, it is necessary to follow the following steps: planning, data collection, analysis, operation, and monitoring.

To plan

In the first phase, an investigation is planned. Planning must answer three questions: what we want to measure, who we want to measure, and how we will do it. In this way, we will know what the main objective is.

Collect data

It is essential for benchmarking and the success or failure of the entire process is highly dependent on it. We can obtain data from different sources: internal, professional associations, or own research of other institutions.

Analyze

After collecting the necessary information, we must analyze the factors that cause the difference between our company and the company understudy to discover opportunities for improvement. Once we have determined the extent of the difference, it is time to propose the improvements we will make. It must be taken into account that due to size, resources, and infrastructure, we will only choose those improvements that our company can make.

Action

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

Monitoring and improvement

In this last stage, a report must be made with all the important information of the process. This will help you get back to work on later projects. The idea is that it becomes an exercise of the company sustained over time to adopt continuous improvement.