Competitive Benchmarking

Objective
• To understand what needs other are satisfying
• To improve concept generation
• To know and improve the state of the art of various subsystems
• To establish product specifications including cost
• For executing the detailed design – to ensure using the best in class suppliers and components

A Benchmarking Approach
• 7-Step process
• Executed using teardown process
• The product specifications, product broachers and other technical information are also inputs

The benchmarking steps

1. Form a list of design issue
2. Form a list of competitive / related products
3. Conduct an Information search
4. Tear down multiple products in class
5. Benchmark by Function
6. Establish best-in-class competitors by function
7. Plot industry trends

1. Form a list of design issue

• From VoC and functional decomposition identify the key design issues
• Assign priorities for various design issues
2. Form a list of competitive / related products
• Identification of competitors and their models
• Study the Market share
• Filter down competitors and models
3. Conduct an Information search
• The products and related process
• The functions they perform
• The targeted market segments
Information Sources
• Written sources of product information
– Libraries
– Yellow pages / Thomas register of companies (www.thomasregister,com)
– Market share report
– National bureau of standards
– Census of manufacturers
– Moody’s industry review
– Consumer reports magazines
– Trade magazines
– Patents
• Market research database
– DIALOG (www.dialog.com)
– Predicasts
– American demographics
 • Other sources
– World Wide Web (www)
– Vendors
– Technical specialists
– Experts / Friends in the industry
– NAICS codes
– Industry associations
4. Tear down multiple products in class
• Heart of benchmarking process
• Its results
– BOM
– Functional model details
– Exploded view
– Function- to-form mappings
• Measure performance
5. Benchmark by Function
• Summarize the comparison by function
• Establish new product function
• Performance measurement
6. Establish best-in-classCompetitors by function
• Highest performing solution / best-in-class
• Complete along hierarchical aggregation of functions
• Up to overall product function
7. Plot industry trends
• Categorization of the market
• Benchmarking of technical solutions
• Benchmarking of competitors