In this highly competitive world, there is an increasing need to tailor and incorporate practices that can drive growth. Benchmarking is one such tool that is crucial for business performance and to keep you in competition with the best-in-class companies. Brian Rickel, COO of the Profit Planning Group (PPG) discusses the objectives of benchmarking and how it can help IT and engineering staffing companies externally compare their own practices with those of the industry’s best.
Objectives Of Benchmarking
- Identifying the key-performance metrics of a product, service, or process
- Choosing companies to benchmark
- Gathering data on practices
- Analyzing the data and identifying areas of improvement
Continuous Improvement and Benchmarking
Benchmarking is equivalent to continuous improvement. It is a process of comparing your industry metrics with those of your peers to identify gaps in your performance and find opportunities to improve.
“Benchmarking establishes a guide for setting achievable goals or reasonable goals, rather than out-of-the-world goals that you won’t be able to achieve,” Brian said. This practice is establishing a realistic approach to continuous improvement—a step-by-step guide that can help you drive growth and stability. It’s a continuous process where you measure the performance and do it over and over again to identify whether your practices are effective.
“This is a practice where you meet, you plan, you measure, you wait a period of time, you measure again, and you compare your performance with the previous measurement to know whether your changes and plans are effective,” Brian said.
Approaching Benchmarking for Your Company
So, how do you approach effective benchmarking for your firm? You need reliable, industry-specific metrics and comparative data to start with, and most general sources lack both elements.
Profit Planning Group (PPG) is focused on extensive benchmarking and collects data and industry metrics through benchmark studies. TechServe Alliance leverages PPG’s experience and partners with them to collect data and information relevant to the technology staffing industry through the TechServe Alliance Operating Practices Report (OPR) survey. “It is important to know that these benchmarks are the only source of that private information for your industry,” Brain said.
If you go to other sources, they will either lack the data specific to your industry or they will cost you a fortune.
“There are some firms, they will offer a benchmarking service that’s usually very costly. And frankly, we don’t know if it’s a perfect service because there is no way they have access to the industry-based data,” Brain said. So, these surveys are your perfect, crowd-sourced assets, to get industry-specific and reliable metrics. It is your road to effective benchmarking.
The TechServe Alliance OPR survey is the perfect opportunity to approach effective industry-specific benchmarking for your IT and engineering staffing firm. Participation in this survey will bring mutual benefit to your business and your community members.
“Most companies need these benchmarks to test their performance and gauge their performance,” Brian added “So, it’s a mutually symbiotic thing where the industry community and individual members mutually benefit from the participation.”
TechServe Alliance members can access Participating in the OPR & Sales and Recruiter Metrics Survey Made Easy webinar through the TechServe Online Learning Center.
