Complimentary Benchmarking: Find Ways to Enhance Performance

Benchmarking contributes to improved profitability, better decisions and greater efficiencies.

Monitoring your key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential, but KPIs are isolated numbers if they are not compared to the numbers of your industry peers.

Benchmarking – or comparing your KPIs to those of companies in your industry and of your size – reveals areas in which you are outperforming, mirroring and underperforming your competitors.

Our complimentary benchmarking analysis uses bar charts and data tables to show side-by-side comparisons of your numbers to industry numbers in areas like liquidity, profits, profit margins, sales, borrowing, assets and employees.

Benchmarking is a valuable tool: it identifies areas that need attention so that the right initiatives can applied to improve results.

Example: Net Profit Margin

Importance of Benchmarking

Benchmarking is a way to improve numbers at all levels of an organization – from high-level performance numbers like sales, COGs, margins and profitability to departmental numbers related to inventory, marketing or labor.

Comparing internal KPIs to industry standards is a proven way to identify the following:

• Areas that are underperforming.
• Areas where market shifts are impacting performance.
• Shortcomings in product or service offerings.
• Areas where costs are higher than competitors.
• Areas in which improvements are most likely to yield results.

Example: Report Summary

Steps in Benchmarking

Our benchmarking approach begins with a discussion of your organization’s goals and the metrics you look at as the most important ones for your overall success.

We talk with you about your industry and competitors so that benchmarking will generate the most relevant comparison, and we review the types of industry data that will be used.

When comparison of your data to competitor data is completed, we meet with you to deliver a comprehensive report in which findings are clearly presented in side-by-side data tables and intuitive charts.

In our summary discussion, we also present ideas on areas to prioritize and initiatives to undertake to realize improved results.

Example: Return on Equity

Value of Benchmarking

Positive outcomes of a benchmarking exercise include the following:

• Fresh and objective insights into areas that should be addressed.
• Prioritization of initiatives based on hard data on the magnitude of deviation from industry standards.
• Your traditional views of results may be challenged by “aha!” moments.
• New perspectives may convince you of the value of regular benchmarking for continuous improvement.

Benchmarking is a sure-fire way to monitor and improve your KPIs: studies have shown that when companies have top-quartile performance rankings, their profitability is 10 times that of bottom-quartile competitors.