Benchmarking for success
The Thailand Productivity Institute is setting up a "benchmarking centre" to encourage networking Thai organisations to share their best practices.
"While [conducting] TQA [Total Quality Award] is a way to 'know oneself', benchmarking helps you to 'know the others', said the institute's executive director Phanit Laosiri, citing ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu who said: "Know yourself, know your enemy, and you shall win a hundred battles".According to the latest survey by global consulting firm Bain & Co, benchmarking continues to be the most popular management tool for small and big firms all over the world. In Thailand, however, this tool has not been widely utilised as most firms are reluctant to disclose information and have not collected their data systematically, he said.
"Benchmarking is the best short-cut tool for learning but it's not a tool for one to copy from the others. Organisations should not fail to innovate and continuously improve, said Phanit.
To encourage Thai organisations to benchmark and share their practices, FTPI will serve as a one-stop venue for providing training, consulting, and database on benchmarking. The pilot project started last year to benchmark production processes, human resource processes, and product development processes of firms in the Thai fashion industry. The second project that will be implemented sometime this year involves benchmarking of "customer service excellence" of TQA and TQC (Total Quality Control) firms, and other participating companies.
Bruce Searles, accredited delivery partner for benchmarking with the Australian Quality Council (AQC) who advises FTPI on the project, pointed out four challenges for firms when pursuing a benchmarking project:
-Focus on practices, not the numbers
This is because "statistics are not telling you how to improve things, they only tell you what to improve." Moreover, it's often not relevant to compare one data to the others.
-Focus on the most important things
Remember the 80:20 rule - a small portion of your business is generating the bulk of productivity and profitability.
-Identify who has the best practices.
Experience tells us that having six or more partners in a benchmarking consortium will help each other the most.
-Implementation
There is a so-called "not invented here" mentality that prevents companies from implementing an improvement programme after learning the best practices of other firms from a benchmarking study.
FTPI's Phanit said Thai firms lagged behind other companies in Asean in making use of benchmarking due to the "culture" of price-cutting and fierce competition against each other. Nonetheless, some Thai companies have recognised the benefit of sharing their best practices such as Ratchaburi Electricity Generating Holding, Khanom Electricity Generating, and two other power firms. They came to the FTPI a few years ago and asked the institute to conduct a study to benchmark among themselves and also with other power companies in the region, to learn how to run their generators at optimum efficiency.
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