All Posts Tagged With: "benchmarking"
The Most Popular Improvement Tools
The list comes from the Global Benchmarking Network’s 2008 survey on business improvement and benchmarking. Which of these does your organization use?
- Mission and vision statement
- Customer/client surveys
- SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats)
- Informal benchmarking (encouraging employees to learn from other organizations)
- Quality management system (think ISO)
- Improvement teams
- Employee suggestion scheme
- PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act)
- Performance benchmarking (comparing process/activity performance levels)
- Knowledge management
- Business process reengineering
- Balanced scorecard
- TQM (total quality management)
- Business excellence (using Baldrige, EFQM, or other national excellence models)
- Best practice benchmarking (structured process for comparing performance and implementing best practices)
- Corporate social responsibility system
- Lean
- Industrial housekeeping (5S)
- Quality function deployment (QFD)
- Six Sigma
More than 450 responses from 44 countries ranked their organizations’ usage of these improvement tools in the order above. The percent of usage ranged from 77% for “mission and vision statement” to 22% for Six Sigma. Every tool from the top through PDCA was used by more than half the respondents; the rest were used by fewer than half.
The Baldrige message is a good news/bad news deal: “Business excellence” is currently being used by just 40% of the respondents, which is pretty good considering that only 59% said they understood what the “business excellence” tool is.
You can read a summary of the survey here.
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Comparative Data for Manufacturers
IndustryWeek (IW) publishes a best plants database that provides a wealth of comparative data for manufacturers. The data are searchable and sortable so that you can find comparisons relevant to your industry. You can analyze more than 250 performance metrics from IW Best Plants winners, finalists, and participants including:
- Annual savings due to improvement methodologies
- Labor, overhead, and material costs as a percentage of costs of goods sold
- Number of benchmarking studies done in the past year (IW Best Plants and finalists conduct an average of four benchmarking studies each year)
- First pass yield (2008 IW Best Plants winners’ median finished-product first-pass yield is 98.6%)
- Percent reduction in in-plant defect rate and scrap/rework costs (same plants reduced scrap and rework costs 33.9% in the past three years)
- Customer reject rate and warranty costs as a percent of sales
- Turnover and absenteeism rates
- Improvement suggestions made/implemented per employee last year
- Hours of training per production employee
- OSHA-reportable incident rate
- Suppliers certified
- Manufacturing cycle time
- Order-to-shipment lead time and on-time delivery (Best Plants median on-time delivery was 99%)
- Average days of inventory and annual inventory turns
- Productivity (sales per employee)
- Customer retention rate
- Return on invested capital
You can order the Best Plants database for $795 for a one-year subscription.
The deadline for applying for the 2009 IW Best Plants awards has passed, but you can download an application to see all that’s involved.
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25Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
