Total Quality Management
Getting Benchmarking off the Bench

The first myth is that benchmarking is too expansive. I disagree with this fact because benchmarking gains are well worth the investment you can do. Indeed benchmarking is a very powerful tool which gives you many data and information for your company. People think benchmarking costs are not justified, and the results aren’t enough. Moreover many of them find benchmarking an extremely and complex process. Besides the fact that benchmarking is associated with giving away more information than you can receive is not true, it is a fiftyfifty exchange and you have not to reveal what make your own company a good one, but only the processes. Therefore, you don’t have to do all your benchmark studies’ in one step, it’s more important to check on one process at a time rather than to do a complete study of another company. If you do it that way, you can apply the results in more than one of your company’s activity. Indeed, what we do in a sector can be interesting for the other ones. Moreover, the costs don’t have to be an obstacle for a company, it is easy to minimize them if you know exactly what you need and what you can enhance in your own process. Besides you don’t have to be ashamed of stealing and adopting other’s ideas because they are better than yours, you can’t be the first in class in every activity.

The second myth is that managers don’t understand and support benchmarking. I don’t agree with this because I think managers need necessarily benchmarking. Even if management and benchmarking aren’t in the same domain, management is internal and benchmarking is about studying external environment, both of them are dependents. I really think managers need benchmarking in order to enhance they own management. Indeed, if they took from their competitors the best management tools, they can save a lot of money or have better employees. You don’t have to go far away to benchmark in management, you can