Benchmarking or comparative evaluation is a procedure by which products or services of a company are taken as a reference to compare them with ours. This comparison will allow us to know the improvements of other businesses and apply them in our company. We are not talking about plagiarizing the competition, we are talking about taking the example of those that have a good performance and using them in ours to improve. By learning from their techniques we can adapt them to our brand and be able to be at the same level to become part of the competition.
Benchmarking classes
We have three kinds of benchmarking. Their common purpose is to help our brand representatives to notice the competition and improve.
- Competitive benchmarking. It is the most complex because it is carried out on the companies to which we have direct competition and normally they are not for the work of collaborating. If there is no cooperation, it will cost us more to carry out the comparison and we will have to use other types of resources and our expenses will become more expensive.
- Internal benchmarking. It is easier than the previous one since it is done within our own company. It is normally carried out in large companies that have a variety of departments or corporate groups that are made up of several companies. In this type, an example is taken of a department that is obtaining optimal results and is transferred to the rest of the company’s departments. It does not require excessive resources to apply it since the comparison comes from the company itself.
- Functional benchmarking. In this benchmarking, our company will not need to look at the competition, nor does it even have to belong to our sector. It will be enough if the techniques used by a company that obtains remarkable results are taken into account. As we are not dealing with direct competition, it is easier to get the necessary information to make the comparison and they usually offer it without impediments.