Custom Benchmarking

Organisations use benchmarking to understand the performance of a product or process compared to another organisation, market averages or best-in-class performances, in order to identify areas of improvement. Roughly, we can identify two types of benchmarks.

The first type can be defined as the standard benchmark. With this approach, an organisation compares it’s performance to an available database of benchmark statistics. Most of the work in this type of benchmark is in capturing and normalizing all the internal performance indicator data in order to compare it successfully to the benchmark database. One of the key benefits of the approach is the level of detail in the dataset.

Pb7 focuses on a second type of approach, the custom benchmark. Organisations look for a custom benchmark for different reasons: benchmark databases may not be available for the desired scope; they will not provide the appropriate sector comparison (e.g. Dutch provinces); or the organisation wants to have more control over the performance indicators that are being used.

A custom benchmark will often provide fewer details, but the focus is on all the details that are required for a good benchmark of the product or process in scope, and the customer has the ability to focus on specific areas and issues. And although a custom benchmark often takes longer to complete, the costs (with Pb7) are usually comparable or even lower compared to standard benchmarking.