Benchmarking vs. Innovation

Do your colleagues challenge your work saying "Have you benchmarked your plan or proposal of improvement with any other organization?" 

If true, then your answer would have been either 'Yes' or 'No'. 

But wait and think again. By the way, is this the right answer? And does your plan or proposal really require benchmarking as one of its essential component? 

First of all, let's understand what is benchmarking. It is comparing your process/practice with industry's best practice. Benchmarking can be done with similar or dissimilar industry, both.

So, when to do benchmarking?

To do the benchmarking, you must know what industry’s best practice is. If you are new to an industry or process, you will be having hard time collecting information for industry's best practice. 

If you are from different industry, and want to benchmark your current company with that industry, be careful that the strategy, values, culture, infrastructure, product price & features, people's competence and skills should also be similar ones or else you will be heading towards failure by doing benchmarking blindly. 

A classic example can be benchmarking DELL's supply chain which is exceptionally well in JIT in a pharmaceutical company. Benchmarking by following the same or similar process of JIT for pharmaceutical products will require similar infrastructure in supply chain, organizational culture, competence and also the product similarity. A laptop of DELL vs. an ointment does not have price similarity. A person can wait to buy 30K INR laptop with customized configuration but not for a medicine. No inventory in case of technology items is great as it works on pull system but for a medicine is required on the shelves every time or else the customer will buy some substitute of recommendation. These work on push concept.

A holistic approach is necessary to do any benchmarking.

If you have come from a similar company within the industry, still caution is required before benchmarking. You just cannot copy and paste the whole process directly and expect same results as you achieved in your last company. The values, culture and organization structure matters a lot. It can make your plan a big failure even when it was a great success in the last company.

Therefore, to conclude, benchmarking does not guarantee the success. You just need to understand and implement what suits the best to your current organization. You should use your past experience as a guide but complete 'copy and paste' is a big 'No'.

And finally, the answer to your colleague's question about benchmarking should be ideally "I have developed the plan according to our company's infrastructure, culture, people's competence, with holistic approach and not just following industry's best practice."

Remember, apple never benchmarked any product to be the best in the market. What it followed was innovation.