Discussion Board

Definition:

Benchmarking is the process by which an organization compares its performance against not only its competitors but also other high performing organizations.

Summary:

In this article, the author, Chris Matt is doing a Question and Answer interview with three people who are all in management within different fields. Chris is asking them what challenges they faced when trying to benchmark their companies energy use and how they developed a plan for conserving energy. The three managers shared the steps they went about in benchmarking the energy use of their companies and what the challenges were that they faced. After the end of their research they shared their results and how they were able to use that information to decide how they could make changes to improve the company.

Discussion:

This article shows how important it is to benchmark your companies success so that if there is an area where improvements can be made, they won't go unseen. In this case, the energy use wasn't the product of any of the manager's companies. However, because they were using too much energy they were able to develop methods to cut down on the cost of energy so that money could be used elsewhere. It is important for companies to benchmark, because it allows them to compare themselves to other competitors. For example, a retail store may benchmark their labor cost. They would compare their cost to other stores in the chain or to their competitors to see if they were needing to cut down on their labor cost or to spend more on labor. I am the General Manager for a Chick-fil-A and we benchmark all of our costs including labor, food, paper, and energy. It allows us to see if their is theft or if we have too many employees or not enough employees. Tracking it every month allows problems to be fixed quickly, rather than tracking it yearly may allow a problem to continue on for a longer period of time.

As Christians, the Bible tells us to be like Christ. 1 Corinthians 11:1, says to be imitators of Christ. I believe that this is similar to benchmarking, as you are to compare yourself to Christ and find the areas you struggle with so that you can improve. As Romans 3:23 says, "For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God" we know that we will never be able to reach the level of Christ, however we are called to be like Him. However, within a company you are able to make the adjustments needed to improve the company so that you can be competitive with other companies.