Sunday, October 7, 2007

Benchmarking Blues

By Mark Brousseau

In a column in the October 15th issue of FORBES, Publisher Rich Karlgaard notes that a flaw common to business and rampant in government is the failure to benchmark. In sports, performance and relative performance are laid bare for anyone to see. But in business, the instincts are to shut our eyes to benchmarking, Karlgaard wrote. “We don’t want to see,” he claimed. Karlgaard’s recommendation is to start the benchmarking process with three questions:

... What does our competition do better than we do?
... Are our shortcomings rooted in our personnel, our system or something else?
... Which companies that are not competitors now could step in and eat our lunch tomorrow if they wanted to?

As another benchmarking tool, TAWPI just launched a survey to track error rates in remittance and retail lockbox operations. The results will be available by year’s end. Want to learn more? E-mail me at m_brousseau@msn.com.

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