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Indian Business Intelligence to improve through benchmarking
By Suman Ravikumar, SiliconIndia
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Friday, 12 November 2010, 23:06 IST |
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Bangalore: Business today is into cut throat competition and business optimization helps you survive the competition in the most efficient way. Every day companies are finding strategies and plans to outdo their peers or rivals by measuring their strengths and weaknesses. Benchmarking is one such way .A scrutiny process that a company goes through to gain knowledge of where they stand in the industry and what are the key areas that they need to improve on. Benchmarking has been in existence over 20 years.
In India, however, benchmarking is yet to take firm roots as for Indian companies, benchmarking is just another survey and the service provided does not come free so the ROI comes into picture for Indian companies. Also Indian companies previously were very orthodox and conservative of being surveyed and exposed.
Some Indian companies that successfully practiced benchmarking over the last decade were Tata and its steel subsidiary, Tisco, Infosys etc. With the growth of SMEs in India, Indian businesses have taken an aggressive global growth path and want to be the best in the world .They not only want to adopt but define the global best practices. The Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, conducted a research survey to understand how performance benchmarking can be leveraged by Indian companies. Deepa Mani, assistant professor of Information Systems, ISB said " According to the respondents , more than 80 percent agreed that they see benefits from understanding their position vis-?-vis the industry, while 76 percent of respondents confirmed that benchmarking would guide them to set their strategic direction." ISB will be the first B school to do the benchmarking survey in India.
Considering the huge boom of business in India, SAP India, a subsidiary of SAP AG has come up with a comprehensive benchmarking program for Indian companies in association with ISB. It will help companies explore the linkage between IT and business metrics. Participants also have the opportunity to recognize company best practices and industry trends. "Our research shows that 87 percent do a very thorough job at building their business case, but only 8-10 percent of the companies retain their focus on value post implementation. More than 150 companies more than 20 industries in India have already leveraged this program to extract more value out of SAP," said Alok Goyal, CEO of SAP India. SAP will be the first enterprise benchmarking application software provider in India. The other players in the market are Winning Moves of United Kingdom, Malaysian Productivity Corporation, Global Benchmarking Network, Best Practice Institute (U.S.) and Harvard Business School (U.S.) who does benchmarking for companies across the globe.
Currently benchmarking is practiced in several countries around the world. In the United Kingdom, it is a well-established tool to measure and improve business performance. The United Kingdom benchmarking Index Program is a famous initiative which created the largest performance data base of SMEs in the world. In Japan MITI is involved in promoting benchmarking within industries and other business sectors. The American and Productivity Centre (APQC) are famous for its benchmarking clearing house in the U.S. Several European countries have begun to adopt benchmarking as a key tool for performance improvement.
However, benchmarking cannot cure all diseases of a company but companies have realized that liberalization and globalization has made the industries very competitive and that finding out the areas of scope of improvement, comparative study helps to achieve your company goals faster by realizing what to do and what not to do.