Does your firm engage in benchmarking? If so, who is your target and why were they chosen?

Benchmarking, the systematic comparison of one's own operations to those of perceived world leaders, has become a universal practice among industry leaders.  It is particularly interesting to hear of examples where firms benchmark themselves against firms in other industries.  For example, virtually every auto maker has studied Dell because they are world leaders in mass customization. 

Does your firm engage in benchmarking?

If so, who is your target and why were they chosen? 

Benchmarking is an improvement process in which an organization measures its performance against that of best in class organizations within or outside its industry. Benchmarking answers the question like how those targeted organizations achieved their performance levels. And finally it uses that information to improve organization’s own performance.

We do engage in benchmarking but for our business it is not just copying what other successful organizations are doing rather it involves understanding what best in class organizations’ goals are and how they have achieved those goals through process and operations improvement and taking that information back to our own organization to determine how to achieve comparable results given our unique internal and external conditions.

Our target benchmarking organizations are Apollo Hospital, Chennai and Bombay Hospital, Bombay. Beside these two technologically advance Indian hospitals we also use national industry average within country to identify our position among our peers organization. The reason we choose these two organizations of India is that they are highly equipped with the latest technology and they are cost and quality leader in the industry. Another key reason for choosing these hospitals are they are we are like them. There Medicare cost and our Medicare cost is similar in nature. Beside this our specialization is also common.

In addition to this, we have certain weakness we want to eliminate. And we know that these two organizations are renowned as best hospitals to improve on those particular functions where we are particular weak.

We choose our competitors (private or public) within our country because we want to measure our position every now and then by comparing with that of our peers and find out how we are doing within the industry.