BENCHMARKING

XEROX

For many years Xerox was the king of copy machine

manufacturing, but they found themselves in a precarious
position when their Japanese competitors were able to
manufacture higher quality copy machines for far less than
Xerox. Xerox compared itself against Japanese competitors and
found that “it took twice as long as the Japanese competitors to
bring a product to market, five times the number of engineers,
four times the number of design changes. The initial results of
the benchmarking showed that Xerox needed to increase its
productivity by 18 percent annually to keep pace with the
competitors. The executives at Xerox realized the severity of the
issue and dedicated a large amount of resources in developing
Xerox’s own benchmarking.
Benchmarking in business is the process of comparing how your
business is doing against the performance of other leaders in your
industry. You can apply benchmarking to your business operations,
sales and products. Measurements that are typically used include cost,
quality, time and customer satisfaction. For example, if you ran a
technology company and wanted to see how your sales compared to
industry benchmarks, you’d most likely run your numbers against big
companies like Google or Apple.

Companies use benchmarking to improve their own processes and

operations. By examining how industry leaders have been able to
accomplish their goals, you can identify gaps in your own processes
and sales. Nearly every business, in every industry, uses benchmarking
as part of its strategy for constant and never-ending improvement.
Zara did a benchmarking study about the Toyota model,
based on Taiichi Ohno's just in time, which consists of a
production organization system for factories that allows
increasing productivity, reducing management costs and
losses in warehouses due to unnecessary stocks. In this
way, it is not produced under assumptions, but on actual
orders.
TYPES
CONCLUSIONS
Pros:
1. Internal benchmarking allows to repurpose
something without reinventing the wheel.
2. Competitive benchmarking can help measure if
companies are heading the right direction.
3. Companies can get a better idea of what our
competitors are doing.
Cons:
4. A better solution could be missed out.

5. Comparison can lead to depend on the success of our

competitor.
6. Companies could stunt innovative thinking.