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Introduction
Businesses houses are continuously striving to be successful amidst the increasingly competitive and constantly changing environments. To achieve that, they must be willing to adopt any processes and accept any benchmarking standards which would help them in not only doing things right but also in doing the right thing.
The bench mark so accepted should be a:
- reference or measurement standard for comparison;
- performance measurement that is the standard of excellence for a specific business; and
- measurable, best-in-class achievement ("On what is a benchmark?", available at: http://retailindustry.about.com/library/terms/b/bld_benchmark.htm).
Competition has become so intense that managers do have less time to respond to market situation. Efficiency in operations and profitability are the key words in driving the organizations today to remain competitive. The rapid technological developments and improvements in communication have forced the manager to deal with a large quantum of data and arrive at the decision, which would produce results comparable to the market standards. This makes the process little too complex. What they perhaps need is some benchmarking indicators to process the data objectively and to come to a conclusion not only correctly but also quickly.
It is observed:
Benchmarking is a process used in management and particularly strategic management, in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best practice, usually within their own sector. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to adopt such best practice, 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 challenge their practices. Benchmarking opens organizations to new methods, ideas and tools to improve their effectiveness. It helps crack through resistance to change by demonstrating other methods of solving problems than the one currently employed, and demonstrating that they work ("On best process of benchmarking", available at: www.managementupdate.info/benchmarking.htm).
Therefore, through this paper, we have devised a process of calculating a suitable bench mark figure called "Balanced score" through which the achievements of the performance in the implementation of the strategy by the firm can be evaluated.
The paper uses the concepts of "Balanced scorecard" proposed by [1] Kaplan and Norton (1992a); and the model adopted by [2] Brown...