How do you use benchmarking to support your decision making and problem solving processes?

Also important to consider is your target audience and how to best communicate outcomes. Highlighting a single measure may best be represented with a bulleted list whereas trends or relational data may best be represented by an appropriate graph (bar, line, scatter, bubble). Tailoring your content while defining your objectives will set you up for success when reporting out your findings.

Be explicit with what and how you are measuring. Stating all assumptions will enable clarity and help achieve tangible continuous improvement in your findings.

It’s worth remembering when analysing your benchmark data that you versus one other peer can be misleading - even if interesting! Just because you are better or worse than them on a metric does not mean you should be targeting the same number that they have. Your benchmark peers may have quite different business models or strategies and on any one metric they may be on the extreme. Instead, consider the range of performance and where you are positioned on a specific metric versus that range: are you near average, in the upper quartile for example? Clearly, this means needing more than one peer, but the more peers you have in your benchmarking activity the more insightful the learnings from your benchmarked performance metrics will be.

Fully agree on your position. One best practice to compare with could be misleading. Better to compare performance on specific metrics with a large group of (comparable) organisations. Difficulty is to find them and to have them all interested in providing data.

To ensure the effectiveness and sustainability of your actions, you should monitor and evaluate their progress and outcomes, and make adjustments as needed. Need careful in this step

To ensure the effectiveness and sustainability of your actions, you should monitor and evaluate their progress and outcomes, and make adjustments as needed. Very Important!!

Revisit your benchmarking selection and methodology each time you repeat the benchmarking process. Ensure what and how you are measuring serves your strategic long term goals. Strategy alignment is essential to continuous improvement initiatives and growth objectives.

A good benchmark will show you how others in your industry or position have responded to the same challenge or decision. A great benchmark will show you how others have responded to the challenge or decision and why they chose the direction that they did. An exceptional benchmark will show you how they responded, why they chose that direction and then what the opportunity for action is for you.