The ability to learn faster than your competition may be the only Essay

The ability to learn faster than your competition may be the only sustainable competitive advantage - Essay Example marking is an externally focused quality improvement technique that looks at the best practices of departments within the organisation, competitors and organisations with activities that are deemed to be functionally similar. As long as superior performance is identified the next step is to gain an understanding of the enablers or drivers of such performance and then apply them to the organisation (Swanson 2005, p. 243). Benchmarking is one of the strategies used in order to compete effectively in the market. It is a process that is used by organisations in order to target the key areas in their operations that can be used to improve competitiveness, productivity and quality. Organizations use benchmarking when they compare their performance against other companies doing similar business (Gitlow 2005, p.195). Quality needs to have a basis for comparison and so organisations use this strategy to determine how they are performing in comparison with their competitors. This allows them to remain competitive. Comparison is normally done with the best performing organisations. Every organisation can benefit from benchmarking as it is highly unlikely that an organisation does everything well or has nothing to learn from the successes of other organisations (Swanson 2005, p. 203). Benchmark is done as a structured process so as to improve performance and achieve improvements. Benchmarking simply put, is the practice of being humble enough to admit that someone else is better at doing something, and being wise enough to learn how to match and even surpass them at it (Williams 2004, p.226). Benchmarking as mentioned is done so as to set performance standards and so as to achieve superior performance that will result to having a competitive advantage in the industry (Peters 2007, p.89). The 2 basic types of benchmarking are internal and external. The internal aspect of it involves self analysis of a company’s own activities so as to determine its strength and