Benchmarking and Reengineering for Business Improvement

BENCHMARKING

Understand and evaluate the current position of a business or organization in relation to best practices and identify areas for performance improvement. Benchmarking can be applied to any product, process, function, or approach in business.

BENCHMARKING STAGES OF IMPROVEMENT

World class, best in class, efficient, effective, incapable.

PROCESS

• Choose a product or service or internal department to benchmark
• Determine which best in class companies you should benchmark against
• Gather information on their internal performance
• Compare the data from both organizations to identify gaps in your company’s performance
• Adopt the processes and policies in place within class performance

REASONS

• Learning from best practices from any industry and incorporating them for improvement
• Helping organization to understand its current performance
• Encouraging continuous improvement projects
• Improve customer satisfaction

REENGINEERING

Redesign of business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in key performance indicators such as quality service and speed. The three C's: Customers, Competition, Change.

• Refocus company values on customer needs
• Redesign core processes, often using information technology to enable improvements
• Rethink basic organizational and people issues

BENEFITS:

• Increased effectiveness
• Reduced overall cost
• Solidifies business focus

TYPES OF INTERNATIONAL STRUCTURE

• FUNCTIONAL STRUCTURE:

  Specialized jobs are grouped according to traditional business functions. Helps to maximize economies of scale. Highly efficient.

• HORIZONTAL INTEGRATION:

  Is the way the company designs its formal structure to specify organizational tasks, divide tasks into jobs, departments, subsidiaries, and get the work done.

• INTERNATIONAL DIVISION STRUCTURE:

  Grouping each international business activity into its own division. Prevents duplication of activities and creates quick response to environmental changes enabling them to deal with different markets.

• PRODUCT DIVISION STRUCTURE:

  These structures work among international companies with diverse products. Similar products are grouped under one product head. There may be duplicate functions and activities among the divisions.

• GEOGRAPHIC DIVISION STRUCTURE:

  Used when foreign operations are large and not dominated by a single country or region. Useful when managers can gain economies of scale on a regional rather than on a global basis.

• MATRIX DIVISION STRUCTURE:

  Deals with competing pressures for global integration and local responsiveness. It makes each group share responsibility for foreign operations and enables each group to exchange information and resources more willingly.