Benchmarking

 

Competitive benchmarking: Best practice guide

What is competitive benchmarking, and how can you use it to get ahead of your competition? Read on to learn how to create KPIs that effectively chart success and the best practices for developing a competitive benchmarking strategy.

What is competitive benchmarking?

Competitive benchmarking analysis seeks to understand your brand’s success against others within your industry. You might evaluate their business strategy, their practices, or the products and services they offer to see whether you compare favorably or unfavorably. Using key performance indicators, you can create a set of benchmarks for yourself to match up to others in your sector and understand where the gaps are.

Competitive benchmarking is a useful tool for understanding where you can go next with your brand strategy, and to see where you could be servicing your customers more effectively. It can help you see why your audience might choose a competitor over you, and work on strategies to attract them to your offering instead.

Typical competitive benchmarking includes metrics such as:

• Customer engagement on social channels
• Brand awareness
• Customer experience ratings, such as satisfaction, ease of use, and more
• Search engine results
• Reviews
• Revenue
• And more

Types of competitive analysis

Competitive benchmarking can be divided into three types: performance benchmarking, strategic benchmarking, and process benchmarking.

Performance benchmarking is where you compare your brand’s performance across revenue, brand awareness, social media engagement, and more to see how you fare against others in your industry. What results do you generate, and how could you improve against your competitors?

Strategic benchmarking is where you evaluate how your brand goes about its business in comparison to competitors. What business models do they use? What planning and execution style does your company use, and how does that compare to the market leader’s approach? By taking a deep look at how you plan for and carry out your strategy, you can become more effective at implementing change and improving.

Process benchmarking is the analysis of how well your current processes work within your business. Evaluating how your processes work in comparison to your competitors can help you to see the differences between your business and the next, allowing you to take inspiration from competitors or work on providing unique selling points to your customers. Becoming more efficient is a key reason to benchmark in this way.

One of the main advantages of breaking down competitive benchmarking in this way is that your overall business strategy can be overhauled in a manageable way. Rather than solely focusing on performance, you can also evaluate the processes and strategies that lead to performance results.

Competitive benchmarking metrics

Before you can create or use competitive benchmarking metrics, you’ll need to gather data and determine what key performance indicators will form the basis of your benchmark.

Gathering data

Before benchmarking yourself against your competitors, you’ll need to complete some thorough research to define your key performance indicators. These will help you to develop some specific metrics to measure yourself against now and in the future.

You might try finding data by doing:

• Business research: What is their annual revenue? How many people do they employ? What are their online reviews like?
• Brand research: What is their share of voice or share of wallet in your sector? What are their online reviews like?
• SEO research: How do they fare in search engine results? Are they using paid social marketing to reach their audience?
• Survey research: How do they survey their customers? How often do they ask for feedback?
• Social media research: What level of social media engagement metrics do they generate? How do their social media metrics compare against your own?
• User experience research: Are their digital platforms mobile-optimized? Are their sites easy to navigate? Is it easy to understand their product and service offering, and make a purchase?
• Content analysis: What content do they produce, how much, and when? Does it get high levels of engagement?

Of course, completing this research and creating competitive benchmark metrics without the available data can be difficult. That’s why since 2019, Qualtrics’ XM Institute™ has completed its annual XMI Customer Ratings  – Digital, a cross-industry, open-standard benchmark that provides a much-needed reference point for companies who want to compare their digital customer experience (CX) against their industry competitors.

See how our new Digital Experience Metrics can help you benchmark more effectively

Completing competitive benchmarking analysis with metrics

Qualtrics’ in-depth research into brands’ relationships with their audiences led to the definition of three critical aspects of a customers’ digital experience:

• Emotion: As measured by customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, how do customers feel about the brand?
• Effort: As measured by customer effort scores (CES), how easy is it for customers to complete their tasks on a brand’s platform?
• Success: As measured by task completion, how successful are customers’ experiences with the brand?

These three elements form the basis of Qualtrics’ DX3 metrics methodology. It is Qualtrics’ simplified approach for measuring meaningful digital experiences and understanding the drivers of conversion, loyalty, and improved customer lifetime value.

Brands often complete CSAT and CES scoring to create internal benchmarks for comparison over time. However, these metrics can be difficult to incorporate into your competitive benchmarking, as the results are often private data.

Qualtrics’ BrandXM™ provides you with insight into your competitors’ performance, and helps you to create data-led strategies for improvement. Unlike other competitive benchmarks, Qualtrics solutions take into account DX3 metrics methodology, which measures economic value alongside other typical indicators of success.

The DX3 metrics in practice

DX3 metrics are able to tie business outcomes directly to increases or decreases in the measurements brands use to benchmark their success, either against themselves or against competitors.

Our latest findings:

• As customer satisfaction (CSAT) improves, customer spend increases by up to 37%
• As customer effort decreases, customer spend increases by up to 23%
• Successful task completion isn’t a useful metric

This means there isn’t a strong relationship between the completion of a task and the amount customers spend. Most customers are able to complete a task - meaning that if they can’t do so on your site, you’re falling behind your competitors significantly.

Positive sentiment and low effort scores drive loyalty

Digital loyalty - or the likelihood to return to a brand’s site - is significantly increased when customers have a positive sentiment toward the brand and find it easy to complete their tasks.

Brands that don’t focus on improving these two factors may well find themselves falling behind as consumers turn their digital loyalty to immediate competitors and industry leaders.

Gaps in Emotion, Effort, and Success reduce potential revenue

For eCommerce industries, gaps in emotion, effort, and success have a negative impact on potential revenue to be generated.

For businesses that sell their goods and services online, one way in which they can improve their bottom line above their competitors is to invest in their digital experience. Given that brands are failing to satisfy or make their experiences low-effort, this is an easy win for brands looking to get ahead.

Creating a strategic benchmarking approach

Using the DX3 metrics methodology as a guide, your strategy to outdo your competition becomes more sophisticated and increases ROI on your efforts. Rather than limiting your efforts to improve using only internal benchmarking, Qualtrics can provide you with competitor analysis and business strategies for improving your market position.

Developing a brand experience strategy using DX3

Rather than aiming to merely increase engagement or a site’s performance, using DX3 metrics alongside traditional competitive benchmarking can help you to develop a more rounded strategy for improved brand experience.

Here’s how you can use Qualtrics BrandXM with the DX3 methodology to develop your brand into an industry leader.

Improve the brand experience

Your brand experience should not only meet customer expectations, but exceed them. Brand sentiment and brand perception can go a long way to influencing a customer to choose you over the competition - make sure you invest in a strategy that not only measures this but creates insights-led action to tackle weaker areas. Customer satisfaction plays a large role in this, so make sure you’re developing a sophisticated survey program to understand precisely where pain points and successes lie.

Reduce customer burden

If there are obstacles in your customers’ way, they’re not going to choose your experience over your competitors’. It’s not enough to just meet best industry practices - you’ll need to be exceptional in making the digital customer journey a smooth process to stand out.

Assume completion is the minimum

Your customers should be able to do what they intend to do when interacting with their brand - fix the pain points in your processes to make sure you’re meeting the baseline for the competition.

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The Benchmarking process 

The formal 10-step benchmarking process is shown in outline below.

What is Competitive Benchmarking? Best Practices

Jakub Spiryn

Benchmarking competitors is a crucial part of growing your business. Today, we will discuss the key metrics, best practices, and core elements of strategic competitive benchmarking.

Creating a detailed go-to-market strategy is impossible without benchmarking your competitors’ performance. There are key metrics you need to focus on and a few good practices to follow.

What is competitive benchmarking?

The competitive benchmarking process is a crucial part of defining the go-to-market strategy. It helps you understand your market position and how you match your rivals with business goals. To perform the analysis, you should define key performance indicators, benchmarking metrics,  and compare your brand to your main competitors.

Every valuable insight you can get from all the data gathered will be based on your set of metrics, so it’s important to talk through your plans with your team.

In the following chapters, I will walk you through the competitive benchmarking process, its benefits, variants, the most important metrics to track, and tools that might help you in your work.

Benefits of competitive benchmarking

It’s hard to grow your business without the knowledge of what your competitors do. It’s not about copying every existing solution, but if the market research shows similar patterns in industry practices, you shouldn’t stay behind. Why? Because your customers might feel your products lack something important.

Competitive benchmarking puts you in a state of constant alert but also growth.

Here’s the list of benefits of benchmarking the key industry players.

01 Identify gaps in your business strategies

Keeping track of your competitors will let you know which activities you do not perform in your business strategy. Performance benchmarking is all about looking for strategic gaps and updating your existing business model with what you believe is crucial to staying on top in your market niche.

02 Track your competitors

Apart from looking for important gaps, you should also track your competitors to be aware of their achievements and the latest industry trends. If you regularly benchmark against industry leaders, you will know how much revenue you can aim for with your products, where to scale, and which departments to expand.

03 Get an overview of your organization

By performing competitive benchmarking, you will gain a lot of knowledge about your company. While setting metrics for the benchmark you will uncover insights within the organization and will be able to understand how you stack up in the market. This is a great opportunity to set up an unbiased opinion about your product.

04 Improve the company culture

Comparing your organization to others in the market niche allows you to identify the cultural areas that need improvement. This includes things like benefits, salaries, but also events and conferences you might attend. If you stay behind, your employers could be tempted to switch jobs.

05 Improve marketing communications

Your marketing team will also benefit from benchmarking against competitors. You can compare customer feedback and social media performance of your main rivals and see which techniques work best in your niche. Overall customer satisfaction should be one of your benchmarking metrics.

06 Increase revenue

Last but not least, performing competitive benchmarks can help you boost your sales and profits. If you compare your sales reports to your main competitors’, you will most probably find hidden opportunities for new customers and markets.

Types of competitive analysis frameworks

Hopefully, you are now hooked up on the idea of competitive benchmarks, so let’s jump to more specific details.

There are various types of competitive analysis frameworks you can try. Here are three popular solutions. You can find more after you process benchmarking.

01 SWOT

SWOT analysis is the one you would learn first in any business school. Although there are now many new and innovative frameworks available, this one is still relevant today and can teach you a lot about your business.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The first two cover internal factors, whereas the latter two indicate external aspects.

You can estimate SWOT for both your brand and your competitors to find chances for growth and ranking improvements.

02 Customer journey map

Another benchmarking process you can include in your analysis is the customer journey map where you inspect all the touchpoints customers have with your brand.

Map all your customer channels (your website, social media, e-mail, etc.) and define buyer personas. Analyze all customer touchpoints according to the personas and find room for improvements.

See how it compares to relevant competitors.

03 Growth-share matrix

The growth-share matrix is divided into four parts:

1. Stars – products with high market growth and high market share.
2. Question marks – products with high market growth but low market share.
3. Cash cows – products with low growth but high share.
4. Pets – low growth and low share.

When you divide your products and/or services into these four groups, you will be able to decide where to put your efforts and which solutions are not worth focusing on.

The most important metrics for competitive benchmarking

There are key points to consider in competitive benchmarks. You don’t have to take them all into consideration, but the more metrics you have, the more thorough your benchmarking process is.

Here are some competitive benchmark metrics you can use in your analysis:

01 Brand awareness

It’s hard to measure brand awareness, but there are internet tools that will help you calculate your overall online presence and reach, and compare it to your competition.

02 Traffic

By “traffic” I mean both the traffic trends and volume. Analyze your most popular sources, geography, and demographics. More traffic in volume does not always mean more conversions, that’s why it’s good to check traffic sources for competitors that have more revenue.

03 Brand sentiment

Is your brand perceived positively or negatively? Tools like Brand24 can help you analyze the sentiment and context of discussion around your brand to discover what customers think about your product and organization.

04 Social media reach

Calculating social media reach will give you an overview of how popular your brand is against the competitors. There are many tools that will help you to calculate this metric, so don’t worry –  you don’t have to do it manually. Scroll down to see some of the most popular competitive benchmarking tools.

By analyzing your (and your competitors’) reach on social media you can also evaluate which types of posts perform the best for your brand and in your niche.

05 Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This metric is used to calculate how your customers feel about the will to recommend your product or services to their friends or family. It’s usually done using a survey.

NPS will tell you a lot about customer loyalty in the market. The higher the score, the more loyal customers you have.

06 Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT is a common benchmarking metric that helps to measure how satisfied the customers are with the product and/or services. It’s very similar to NPS (discussed above) – the main difference is that NPS calculates loyalty, whereas CSAT measures satisfaction.

By polling the target audience you can gather public data for both NPS and CSAT and compare your brand to close competitors.

07 Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

To calculate ARPU you should divide your revenue by the number of active users in the measured period. Some brands share ARPU regularly in their business reports, so it’s good to follow your competitors and include it in the competitive benchmarking process.

Competitive benchmarking tools

To follow the best industry practices and perform a thorough competitive benchmarking you can use digital tools that will help you organize and automatize your work. Here are some of the most popular tools that will assist you while analyzing your competitive benchmarking metrics.

01 Brand24

While Brand24 is mostly aimed at monitoring your brand’s online presence, it’s a perfect tool for following industry leaders and trends, too. You can set up projects to monitor your main competitors and perform social media audits and calculate their presence score.

Pricing: Plans start at $49 / month

02 BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo offers competitive intelligence reports. If you want to follow your industry competitors, you can use BuzzSumo to learn what content they are producing, which social media channels they are most popular on, and how your content compares to theirs in terms of performance.

Pricing: Free plan available, professional plans start at $99 / month.

03 SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is the best tool for checking engagement metrics on sites you don’t have access to their Google Analytics (which is unlikely). SimilarWeb will allow you to check estimated web traffic, sources, and simplified demographics.

Pricing: Free limited plan and tailored premium options.

04 Ahrefs

To check the competitor’s site’s performance, use Ahrefs or a similar tool. Ahrefs can also estimate web traffic but, most importantly, it will also give you an SEO overview of the website. Check what keywords are your competitors ranking with and perform a gap analysis to discover opportunities for new content.

Pricing: Ahrefs starts at $99 / month.

Best practices for competitive benchmarking

At the end of the day, competitive benchmarking is supposed to help you, but to achieve success you need to stay modest and objective. Here’s what you need to remember about while benchmarking against competitors:

• Stay objective – don’t undermine your competitor’s performance, and don’t overestimate your success.
• Remember that competitive benchmarking is an ongoing process. Update your analysis regularly to stay on track.
• Think through every metric you take into consideration. Will you be able to improve in these areas? Are those KPIs measurable?

How can I use competitive benchmarking to optimize my business?

Various business models involve the need to processing benchmarking public and private data to analyze growth.

By using different tools and measures for competitive benchmarking analysis, you can learn a lot about your organization and your close competitors. A thorough analysis will be helpful not only in reaching marketing goals, but also strengthening good practices within the company’s culture, improving investor relations, and increasing revenue.

Competitive research will keep you updated about market trends, rivals’ moves, and changes in the target audience.

The benchmarking process encourages to find gaps, opportunities, and weak points in your strategy. Use competitive benchmarking to improve your digital channels and ensure the product’s success!

https://bit.ly/3ESsgzT

Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost.

Benchmarking is used to measure performance using a specific indicator (cost per unit of measure, productivity per unit of measure, cycle time of x per unit of measure or defects per unit of measure) resulting in a metric of performance that is then compared to others.^[1]

Also referred to as "best practice benchmarking" or "process benchmarking", this process is used in management in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best-practice companies' processes, usually within a peer group defined for the purposes of comparison. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Benchmarking may be a one-off event, but is often treated as a continuous process in which organizations continually seek to improve their practices.

In project management benchmarking can also support the selection, planning and delivery of projects.^[2][3]

In the process of best practice benchmarking, management identifies the best firms in their industry, or in another industry where similar processes exist, and compares the results and processes of those studied (the "targets") to one's own results and processes. In this way, they learn how well the targets perform and, more importantly, the business processes that explain why these firms are successful. According to National Council on Measurement in Education, benchmark assessments ^[4] are short assessments used by teachers at various times throughout the school year to monitor student progress in some area of the school curriculum. These also are known as interim government.

Procedure

There is no single benchmarking process that has been universally adopted. The wide appeal and acceptance of benchmarking has led to the emergence of benchmarking methodologies. One seminal book is Boxwell's Benchmarking for Competitive Advantage (1994).^[6] The first book on benchmarking, written and published by Kaiser Associates,^[7] is a practical guide and offers a seven-step approach. Robert Camp (who wrote one of the earliest books on benchmarking in 1989)^[8] developed a 12-stage approach to benchmarking.

The 12 stage methodology consists of:

1. Select subject
2. Define the process
3. Identify potential partners
4. Identify data sources
5. Collect data and select all partners
6. Determine the gap
7. Establish process differences
8. Target future performance
9. Communicate
10. Adjust goal
11. Implement
12. Review and recalibrate

The following is an example of a typical benchmarking methodology:

• Identify problem areas: Because benchmarking can be applied to any business process or function, a range of research techniques may be required. They include informal conversations with customers, employees, or suppliers; exploratory research techniques such as focus groups; or in-depth marketing research, quantitative research, surveys, questionnaires, re-engineering analysis, process mapping, quality control variance reports, financial ratio analysis, or simply reviewing cycle times or other performance indicators. Before embarking on comparison with other organizations it is essential to know the organization's function and processes; base lining performance provides a point against which improvement effort can be measured.
• Identify other industries that have similar processes: For instance, if one were interested in improving hand-offs in addiction treatment one would identify other fields that also have hand-off challenges. These could include air traffic control, cell phone switching between towers, transfer of patients from surgery to recovery rooms.
• Identify organizations that are leaders in these areas: Look for the very best in any industry and in any country. Consult customers, suppliers, financial analysts, trade associations, and magazines to determine which companies are worthy of study.
• Survey companies for measures and practices: Companies target specific business processes using detailed surveys of measures and practices used to identify business process alternatives and leading companies. Surveys are typically masked to protect confidential data by neutral associations and consultants.
• Visit the "best practice" companies to identify leading edge practices: Companies typically agree to mutually exchange information beneficial to all parties in a benchmarking group and share the results within the group.
• Implement new and improved business practices: Take the leading edge practices and develop implementation plans which include identification of specific opportunities, funding the project and selling the ideas to the organization for the purpose of gaining demonstrated value from the process.

Cost[edit]

The three main types of costs in benchmarking are:

• Visit Costs - This includes hotel rooms, travel costs, meals, a token gift, and lost labor time.
• Time Costs - Members of the benchmarking team will be investing time in researching problems, finding exceptional companies to study, visits, and implementation. This will take them away from their regular tasks for part of each day so additional staff might be required.
• Benchmarking Database Costs - Organizations that institutionalize benchmarking into their daily procedures find it is useful to create and maintain a database of best practices and the companies associated with each best practice now.

The cost of benchmarking can substantially be reduced through utilizing the many internet resources that have sprung up over the last few years. These aim to capture benchmarks and best practices from organizations, business sectors and countries to make the benchmarking process much quicker and cheaper.^[9]

Technical/product benchmarking

The technique initially used to compare existing corporate strategies with a view to achieving the best possible performance in new situations (see above), has recently been extended to the comparison of technical products. This process is usually referred to as "technical benchmarking" or "product benchmarking". Its use is well-developed within the automotive industry ("automotive benchmarking"), where it is vital to design products that match precise user expectations, at minimal cost, by applying the best technologies available worldwide. Data is obtained by fully disassembling existing cars and their systems. Such analyses were initially carried out in-house by car makers and their suppliers. However, as these analyses are expensive, they are increasingly being outsourced to companies who specialize in this area. Outsourcing has enabled a drastic decrease in costs for each company (by cost sharing) and the development of efficient tools (standards, software).

Types

Benchmarking can be internal (comparing performance between different groups or teams within an organization) or external (comparing performance with companies in a specific industry or across industries). Within these broader categories, there are three specific types of benchmarking: 1) Process benchmarking, 2) Performance benchmarking and 3) Strategic benchmarking. These can be further detailed as follows:

• Process benchmarking - the initiating firm focuses its observation and investigation of business processes with a goal of identifying and observing the best practices from one or more benchmark firms. Activity analysis will be required where the objective is to benchmark cost and efficiency; increasingly applied to back-office processes where outsourcing may be a consideration. Benchmarking is appropriate in nearly every case where process redesign or improvement is to be undertaking so long as the cost of the study does not exceed the expected benefit.
• Financial benchmarking - performing a financial analysis and comparing the results in an effort to assess your overall competitiveness and productivity.
• Benchmarking from an investor perspective- extending the benchmarking universe to also compare to peer companies that can be considered alternative investment opportunities from the perspective of an investor.
• Benchmarking in the public sector - functions as a tool for improvement and innovation in public administration, where state organizations invest efforts and resources to achieve quality, efficiency and effectiveness of the services they provide.^[10]
• Performance benchmarking - allows the initiator firm to assess their competitive position by comparing products and services with those of target firms.
• Product benchmarking - the process of designing new products or upgrades to current ones. This process can sometimes involve reverse engineering which is taking apart competitors products to find strengths and weaknesses.
• Strategic benchmarking - involves observing how others compete. This type is usually not industry specific, meaning it is best to look at other industries, i.e. Strategic Benchmarking with the help of PIMS (Profit impact of marketing strategy).
• Functional benchmarking - a company will focus its benchmarking on a single function to improve the operation of that particular function. Complex functions such as Human Resources, Finance and Accounting and Information and Communication Technology are unlikely to be directly comparable in cost and efficiency terms and may need to be disaggregated into processes to make valid comparison.
• Best-in-class benchmarking - involves studying the leading competitor or the company that best carries out a specific function.
• Operational benchmarking embraces everything from staffing and productivity to office flow and analysis of procedures performed.^[11]
• Energy benchmarking - process of collecting, analysing and relating energy performance data of comparable activities with the purpose of evaluating and comparing performance between or within entities.^[12] Entities can include processes, buildings or companies. Benchmarking may be internal between entities within a single organization, or - subject to confidentiality restrictions - external between competing entities.

Tools

Benchmarking software can be used to organize large and complex amounts of information. Software packages can extend the concept of benchmarking and competitive analysis by allowing individuals to handle such large and complex amounts or strategies. Such tools support different types of benchmarking (see above) and can reduce the above costs significantly.

The emerging technology of benchmarking engines automates the stage of going from data to noteworthy comparative insights, sometimes even expressing the insights in English sentences.

List of benchmarking methods and software tools

Benchmarking requires the use of specific valuation methods. With evaluation is meant the level of achieving the target for a particular evaluation item. There are general "methods" respectively approaches as well as IT-supported "software tools" that enable an effective and efficient work.

The following is a list of notable methods and benchmarking software tools.

Benchmarking methods

There are many benchmarking methods each having different analytical focus. The methods are mostly known and will be shown in the following summary.^[1]

Methods	Notes
Matrix technology
Comparison tables
Graphs: Pie chart, Bar chart / Histogram
SWOT analysis
Potential/resources-analysis
Price/performance ratio
Potential analysis
Life cycle analysis
market growth/market share portfolio
market attractiveness/competitive strength portfolio
Portfolio attractiveness customer/supplier position
Technology/resource strength
Market position/technology position portfolio
Contribution margin/cost development portfolio
Price/customer satisfaction portfolio
Revenue share/revenue portfolio
Spider web diagram

Benchmarking software tools

There are a number software tools that allow the support of different kinds of benchmarking types.

Software	Publisher	Platforms	Notes
Baromitr.com	Subscribe Labs Inc	web-based	This web-based software platform allows any peer group benchmark any performance area of interest. Data is kept secure, identities are kept anonymous and results are shared in a log-in only environment with time-series visualizations and detailed views.
BenchmarkIndex	Winning Moves Ltd	web-based
Combo Benchmark	Compare to Compete Online Benchmarking	web-based database	This web-based database is suitable for groups of competitors to benchmark individual performance against group performance. All process and performance benchmarks can be processed in this software, providing interesting analysis tools and complete benchmarking report.
Gobench	INDEC GmbH & Co. KG	web-based database	The web-based database supports different kinds of benchmarking categories (product, process, competitor / customer, reverse engineering, marketing, patents, technologies, innovations, ...) and allows reams of analysing possibilities [2]
PowerStats.com	PowerStats Limited, Auckland, NZ	web-based, automated, self-service	PowerStats is a highly-automated platform intended to allow groups of competitors to contribute, manage and visualize data for purposes of benchmarking. Participants load raw data on a regular basis, and PowerStats creates relevant KPIs in real-time, making them available via self-service charts and tables via its online interface.
Workload Simulator (WSim)	IBM	mainframe server	WSim simulates one or many network terminal(s) to load a mainframe computer system by executing programmed scripts, for functional testing, system testing, regression testing, capacity management, benchmarking and stress testing. It is a re-packaged, subset version of IBM's Teleprocessing Network Simulator.[3]: 19–22
Value Lifecycle Manager	SAP	web-based, automated, self-service	SAP Value Lifecycle Manager (VLM) version = Based on an internal system that has been in use for more than 10 years. After registering, it is self-service for survey capture and provides personalized dashboards. The idea being that you can estimate the value of a business initiative.

Benchmarking HPC Clusters

There are numerous suites for examining the performance of a High Performance Computing cluster, including

• ADEPT - 4 suites relating to energy measurements
• HPCC, HPCG, Linpack
• IMB (Intel MPI Benchmark) - gives rates for common MPI-1 point-to-point and collectives
• Mantevo - series of "mini apps" from Sandia National Labs (SNL)
• NAS & NPB
• SHOC - for accelerators
• Stream (memory b/w)

Metric benchmarking

Another approach to making comparisons involves using more aggregative cost or production information to identify strong and weak performing units. The two most common forms of quantitative analysis used in metric benchmarking are data envelopment analysis (DEA) and regression analysis. DEA estimates the cost level an efficient firm should be able to achieve in a particular market. In infrastructure regulation, DEA сan be used to reward companies/operators whose costs are near the efficient frontier with additional profits. Regression analysis estimates what the average firm should be able to achieve. With regression analysis, firms that performed better than average can be rewarded while firms that performed worse than average can be penalized. Such benchmarking studies are used to create yardstick comparisons, allowing outsiders to evaluate the performance of operators in an industry. Advanced statistical techniques, including stochastic frontier analysis, have been used to identify high and weak performers in industries, including applications to schools, hospitals, water utilities, and electric utilities.^[13]

One of the biggest challenges for metric benchmarking is the variety of metric definitions used among companies or divisions. Definitions may change over time within the same organization due to changes in leadership and priorities. The most useful comparisons can be made when metrics definitions are common between compared units and do not change so improvements can be changed.

Social media and benchmarking

Social media is beginning to penetrate more and more into existing business processes. In this sense, benchmarking is no exception. Because of their inherent characteristics, it can even be argued that social media will have a significant impact on benchmarking. Here are some of the benefits associated with this.

• Joint benchmarking is, in fact, a social activity, and social media provide many new and effective ways for social interaction.
• Social media opens the way to new additional sources of information and data collection channels.
• Benchmarking is becoming increasingly business-oriented, and social media is supporting this type of continuous engagement, different from working on individual projects.

References[edit]

1. ^ Fifer, R. M. (1989). Cost benchmarking functions in the value chain. Strategy & Leadership, 17(3), 18-19.
2. ^ Invernizzi, Diletta Colette; Locatelli, Giorgio; Brookes, Naomi J. (2017-08-01). "How benchmarking can support the selection, planning and delivery of nuclear decommissioning projects" (PDF). Progress in Nuclear Energy. 99: 155–164. doi:10.1016/j.pnucene.2017.05.002.
3. ^ Invernizzi, Diletta Colette; Locatelli, Giorgio; Brookes, Naomi J. (2018-03-05). "A methodology based on benchmarking to learn across megaprojects: The case of nuclear decommissioning" (PDF). International Journal of Managing Projects in Business. 11 (1): 104–121. doi:10.1108/IJMPB-05-2017-0054. ISSN 1753-8378.
4. ^ National Council on Measurement in Education (USA) http://www.ncme.org/ncme/NCME/Resource_Center/Glossary/NCME/Resource_Center/Glossary1.aspx?hkey=4bb87415-44dc-4088-9ed9-e8515326a061#anchorB Archived 2017-07-22 at the Wayback Machine
5. ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-08-03. Retrieved 2013-12-04.
6. ^ Boxwell Jr, Robert J (1994). Benchmarking for Competitive Advantage. Robert J Boxwell Jr, New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 225. ISBN 0-07-006899-2.
7. ^ Beating the competition: a practical guide to Benchmarking. Washington, DC: Kaiser Associates. 1988. p. 176. ISBN 978-1-56365-018-5. Archived from the original on 2009-08-27. Retrieved 2009-07-14.
8. ^ Camp, R. (1989). The search for industry best practices that lead to superior performance. Productivity Press.
9. ^ "What is Benchmarking? Save Supply Chain Costs" Retrieved 2014-3-25.
10. ^ Del Giorgio Solfa, F. (2017). Public Benchmarking: contributions for subnational governments and Benchmarking Design. Villa Elisa: FDGS, p. 5. ISBN 978-987-42-6026-0. doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.36285.10722
11. ^ "Benchmarking: How to Make the Best Decisions for Your Practice". NueMD. 2013-12-13.
12. ^ prEN16231:2011 Energy Efficiency Benchmarking Methodology, Brussels: CEN, 2011, p5 (Definition 3.2)
13. ^ Body of Knowledge on Infrastructure Regulation "Incentive Regulation: Basic forms of Regulation"