Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<p><b>Gregory H. Watson</b> is an independent business advisor to Fortune 500 senior management teams. An experienced expert in quality and benchmarking, he has been vice president of quality at Xerox Corporation, vice president of benchmarking at the American Productivity &amp; Quality Center, and director of corporate quality at Compaq Computer Corporation.</p>

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<p>Strategic benchmarking is a proven and effective methodology for improving overall business performance by examining the long-term strategies and approaches that enable high-performing companies to succeed. It helps companies identify best practices in relation to product development and delivery, core competencies, customer service, change preparedness, and more. It's a reliable and accurate way to gauge the market position and success of any business.</p> <p>In 1993, Gregory Watson introduced this revolutionary business performance methodology to managers and executives in Strategic Benchmarking. Now, this new edition updates Watson's classic text for the twenty-first century. This edition includes everything from the first edition, along with additional material that brings it fully into line with current thinking and practice. Most important, it includes entirely new chapters on supplementing strategic benchmarking with statistical concepts from Six Sigma. It features new information and resources, fresh case studies, and a new discussion of strategic planning and benchmarking.</p> <p>Six Sigma is changing and influencing American companies from coast to coast. Six Sigma significantly improves benchmarking in important ways: it provides an objective analysis standard for measuring cross-company performance; it delivers a scientific method to benchmarking through the use of a disciplined analytical approach; its mapping feature breaks down processes into single steps for individual analysis; and it helps optimize the performance and demonstrates the effectiveness of a proposed process change.</p> <p>With the addition of Six Sigma, this new edition helps managers undertake a serious assessment of their business assumptions, technological aptitudes, operational capabilities, and organizational competencies. This allows a true examination of corporate strategy, as well as a clear picture of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes of the workers who drive increased performance. Applying the scientific method to strategic benchmarking makes business planning a precise and measurable activity&#151;and leads to real results. Strategic Benchmarking Reloaded with Six Sigma gives managers and business leaders a comprehensive, effective guide to better quality and higher performance.</p>

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Strategic benchmarking is a proven and effective methodology for improving overall business performance by examining the long-term strategies and approaches that enable high-performing companies to succeed. It helps companies identify best practices in relation to product development and delivery, core competencies, customer service, change preparedness, and more. It's a reliable and accurate way to gauge the market position and success of any business.

In 1993, Gregory Watson introduced this revolutionary business performance methodology to managers and executives in Strategic Benchmarking. Now, this new edition updates Watson's classic text for the twenty-first century. This edition includes everything from the first edition, along with additional material that brings it fully into line with current thinking and practice. Most important, it includes entirely new chapters on supplementing strategic benchmarking with statistical concepts from Six Sigma. It features new information and resources, fresh case studies, and a new discussion of strategic planning and benchmarking.

Six Sigma is changing and influencing American companies from coast to coast. Six Sigma significantly improves benchmarking in important ways: it provides an objective analysis standard for measuring cross-company performance; it delivers a scientific method to benchmarking through the use of a disciplined analytical approach; its mapping feature breaks down processes into single steps for individual analysis; and it helps optimize the performance and demonstrates the effectiveness of a proposed process change.

With the addition of Six Sigma, this new edition helps managers undertake a serious assessment of their business assumptions, technological aptitudes, operational capabilities, and organizational competencies. This allows a true examination of corporate strategy, as well as a clear picture of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes of the workers who drive increased performance. Applying the scientific method to strategic benchmarking makes business planning a precise and measurable activity—and leads to real results. Strategic Benchmarking Reloaded with Six Sigma gives managers and business leaders a comprehensive, effective guide to better quality and higher performance.

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Strategic Benchmarking Reloaded with Six Sigma

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Competitive innovation works on the premise that a successful competitor is likely to be wedded to a "recipe" for success. That's why the most effective weapon new competitors possess is a clean sheet of paper. And why an incumbent's greatest vulnerability is its belief in accepted practice. -Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad

Introduction

Benchmarking is a process of comparing in order to learn how to improve. Motivation for a benchmarking study is the desire to improve and become more competitive. But benchmarking is not the silver bullet of performance improvement!

Ever since 1990 when Roger Milliken declared that "benchmarking is the art of stealing shamelessly," many executives have thought that the process of benchmarking is a "quick fix" for making business performance improvements. However, benchmarking is not a quick fix; it is a rigorous process that requires both sweat equity-learning about one's own processes and coordinating study missions to other organizations-and analytical thoroughness-measurement and analysis of work process performance as well as the detailed mapping of processes and side-by-side assessment of process differences.

Benchmarking uses the analytical information contained in a benchmark, a comparative measure of process or results performance, to establish which organization is candidate for a best practice in a specific business process. Then the business process must be thoroughly defined in order to understand how benchmark performance was achieved and to identify enablers of this successful performance. Finally, a cultural adaptation of the learning must be made in order to apply this new knowledge to your own organization. In order for benchmarking to be successful, it must heed the warning of Dr. W. Edwards Deming who said, "It is hazard to copy. One must understand the theory of what one wishes to do" (1982). Cultural adaptation and business model adaptation are necessary to assure that lessons observed from one place can be successfully transferred someplace else. As Deming also cautioned, "Adapt, don't adopt. It is error to copy" (1982). So how can we more carefully describe what is meant by benchmarking?

Benchmarking Defined According to Categories of Practice

Benchmarking has been described as a search for best practices-indeed, it is the process of comparing the performance and process characteristics between two or more organizations in order to learn how to improve. However, a problem that began early in the game of benchmarking was a lack of clarity in the meaning of the term. In Bob Camp's first book on benchmarking, he described four ways to approach the problem of data collection that were distinguished using the logic of where information was obtained. The way that he distinguished these categories was classified according to the source of the benchmarking data. One problem with this breakdown of benchmarking is that it focuses too narrowly on where data is obtained, rather than on the objective of the study itself-in other words, the focus of the definition is on the process of benchmarking rather than on the lessons that must be learned. A different approach is required to understand the context of benchmarking and how it fits into business. This was the approach that was initiated in my second book on the subject of benchmarking, and we will present a complete definition of benchmarking in this chapter.

First, the starting point of benchmarking is measurement-the benchmark is after all a measurement. However, we must distinguish between the act of measuring performance and the process of benchmarking. A benchmarking process uses a common measurement standard to compare across organizations to determine where a best practice exists based on the results it produces. After the performance has been measured, then a further investigation is conducted to characterize the practices that lead to the observed performance and the root causes of the performance advantage are documented as a best practice. Thus, the first distinction that must be drawn is the difference between performance measurement and process benchmarking. Each of these ways to improve addresses a different set of questions (see Figure 1.1):

All benchmarking is process benchmarking. To understand the dynamic characteristics of a benchmarking study, the different terms that identify the choices that can be taken in the design of a study must be identified and defined. The first term that must be defined is process benchmarking.

Process benchmarking: A method for studying work process performance between two unique or distinct implementations of the same fundamental activity. Process benchmarking includes internal inspection of an organization's own performance as well as the external study of another organization that is recognized for achieving superior performance as evidenced by an objective standard of comparison (the benchmark). The objective of process benchmarking is not to calculate a quantitative performance gap, but to identify best practices that may be adapted for improvement of organizational performance.

There are two categories of process benchmarking studies that may be differentiated according to their application as strategic or operational studies. These two categories are further divisible into performance and perceptual benchmarking studies depending on the type of data that is being compared. The relationship among these distinctions is clarified in the following:

Strategic Benchmarking: A benchmarking study whose objective is to discover ideas for improvement that will trigger breakthrough changes and may be leveraged across the business to enhance an organization's competitive advantage.

Strategic benchmarking studies challenge management to move from a current state to a desired state of business performance by identifying potential breakthrough opportunities that can generate significant profitability or productivity improvement. A strategic study focuses on critical business areas that must change to attain or maintain the competitive advantage of a business, including the validity of critical business assumptions, options for improving core competence areas, concepts for development of business processes, alternative ways to approach technology inflection points, or ways to strengthen business fundamentals that define the organization's operational strategy.

A strategic benchmarking study may change the total framework of an organization by assessing topics such as strategic direction; structure or governance of the business; decisions supporting capital acquisition or investments in research and design (R&D); decisions affecting management choices regarding either business or product line positioning; or change management strategies (e.g., pursuit of a specific strategy such as implementation of an enterprise software product or management's choice of an improvement methodology-for example, ISO9000, Total Quality Management [TQM], or Six Sigma) as a way to induce change in the organization. These types of benchmarking projects can act as...