What is there to benefit from Benchmarking?
Many businesses would like to know how well they are performing in comparison with their competitors, or even how the separate areas of their business are faring. Benchmarking, either internally or externally is the best way to get these answers.
Measuring your performance in terms of time, quality and cost will help you to see which areas of your business you need to improve, and more specifically the individual processes that are perhaps leading to problems within your business. Applying the knowledge you learn from benchmarking effectively, could help facilitate an improved performance in critical functions within your organisation, or within key areas of the business.
Benchmarking can suit your needs whether you are looking to gain rapid market growth or whether you are looking to find the average performance level with your sector, it really does provide benefit for businesses of any stature. Your needs will depend on a number of factors including:
- Your current market position
- Your short term objectives
- Your long term aims
The benchmarking process need not be limited to your own industry either. Benchmarking within your industry is of course a great place to start, but you will probably already have a pretty good idea how your industry performs. It may be wise therefore to reach outside and above your own industry into other industries that perform a similar process but may have to perform this process extremely well in order to succeed. For example, a hotel who has issues with their booking-in systems may benchmark themselves against the admittance processes of a hospital, as the smooth running of an admittance process in a hospital is critical to its success or failure.
By benchmarking effectively, you will see who else perfoms processes well, either inside or outside of your industry and then you can adapt these processes into your organisation.
To reap full benefit from benchmarking you should aim to use the data you receive as you would any other market data, attempt to set targets with it, set further objectives to help you get your company to where you want to be. The data could be of real use to you, and the slightest area of improvement may make the biggest difference.
About Us
Sollertia was established in 2004 to allow SME’s to benefit from cost effective adaptable outsourcing of their accounting and finance requirements, at a fraction of the cost to hiring dedicated in-house staff. Massive investment in contemporary IT, bespoke software, online web ware and superb accountancy professionals has allowed Sollertia’s clients to benefit from having a completely outsourced accounting / finance department service – which cuts their accountancy costs by up to 50%.
Our services include:
Cashflow Management Financial Director Consultancy
Outsourced Credit Control Outsourced Payroll
Management Accounting Business Benchmarking
Outsourced Bookkeeping Tax Compliance Services
Sollertia are registered Member in Practice (MiP) with the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA)