Benchmarking Needs To Be Structured

To turn the spotlight on benchmarking, The Strategist introduces Dr Robert C Camp, the worlds best known benchmarking expert, who is recognised for his leadership in benchmarking and is cited in International Whos Who of Quality.

Today, Dr Camp is president, benchmarking competency, The Quality Network Inc, an international education, research and consulting organisation that serves a number of large domestic and international manufacturing and service firms like American Express, AT&T, Citibank, IBM, J&J, Motorola, P&G, Nokia, HP, SKF and Price Waterhouse, among others. Prior to joining the Quality Network in 1995, Camp made his mark as head of benchmarking competency at Xerox Corp, where he was responsible for creating the benchmarking programme for Xerox.

 

His 1989 best-seller, Benchmarking: The Search for Industry Best Practices that lead to Superior Performance is an industry classic and a vital quality tool. Subsequently, the author has published an update of his earlier work, titled Business Process Benchmarking: Finding and Implementing Best Practices.

In India recently to lead a seminar on benchmarking, organised by the Institute of Quality Ltd (IQL), Camp took time off to spend an hour with Shishir Prasad discussing different facets of the benchmarking concept.

Excerpts from an exclusive interview.

Q. How is benchmarking different from a systematised imitation programme?

A: Well, in the past there have been organisations which have always done comparative analyses and they have done them pretty much in a random fashion. What has happened in the last 15 years is that this methodology called benchmarking started, which is a more disciplined way of doing that on a continuing basis.

And it is proving a couple of things. One, we need to focus more on improving our processes and two, we can, in fact, learn from people who are not in our industry. By this I mean that the order entry operation in the steel industry can be compared with the order entry operation in insurance or banking. In those kinds of extreme comparisons where you might find breakthrough results are not the kinds of things that were done earlier.

In particular, what they have not done is that they have not looked outside their own industry. Most industries are quite insular. For example, the steel industry just watches the steel industry. They do not look outside. So we have broken some paradigms in the kinds of comparisons we can make and at the same time done so in a much more planned fashion.

Q. What explains this ostrich-like attitude and now what has caused the mindshift?

A: I do not know if I can put a finger on why industries tend to become insular. Perhaps, it is because they tend to think they are the best, they have been operating and perhaps successfully for many years. So success just breeds a certain attitude which says, Why should I try to do better than what I am doing. But in most recent history there has been such radical change that is quite different from the pace of change in the past. This has simply required that organisations look elsewhere.

The business of not looking outside the industry was a paradigm which was broken, at least we would like to think with some of the work we did, when I was at Xerox.

We were always doing what we call competitive benchmarking