One of the main tasks of the management of an economic entity is to increase the efficiency of its operations. While the traditional methods of managing such as an enterprise becomes less effective in a rapidly growing global market, the increasing popularity of such management instrument as benchmarking is well-grounded. Benchmarking is understood as identification of the best practices in the firms of partners and competitors in order to use them in one’s company to increase productivity. The increasing relevance of this method is brought about by the fact that it offers solutions in all spheres of management and allows to adopt practices that are known to work without spending money on their testing. The benefits of increased use of marketing lie in improving the production processes,
Increased reliance on benchmarking as a leading management tool has led to significant improvement of production processes. Indeed, when the best methods and technologies of other enterprises or industries are researched and implemented in a company, it allows companies to manage their resources more efficiently. Through giving an insight into how advanced companies work, benchmarking helps to improve business processes relatively quickly and at a lower cost. Thus, benchmarking is characterized by an initial analysis of the internal environment of the company, and helps to identify bottlenecks in management, production, and commercial processes. Later, the best practices are sought out to get rid of the bottlenecks and improve the company’s performance. The relevance of business process improvement through benchmarking lies in the fact that the companies are able to implement the best practices in all spheres of management at the same time considering the specifics of each field.
Increased use of benchmarking has also allowed to significantly boost the effectiveness of the companies’ performance. Through collection and comparison of quantitative performance indicators and comparing high-quality information about business practices, companies gain knowledge of how to economize recourses and make the staff perform more effectively. Thus, the use of benchmarking allows to carry out a quantitative assessment of structures and processes already at the comparison stage in order to find rationalization reserves in the search for effective entrepreneurship. This can lead to profitable entrepreneurship with high efficiency, creating high-level competition and meeting the needs of buyers. The relevance of increasing effectiveness with the help of benchmarking lies in the fact that the practice allows to cut costs and minimize the resources used at the same time. This enhances the input of the staff into the production processes.
Finally, the increased use of benchmarking opens up great possibilities for the implementation of innovative activities within a company. Benchmarking is not limited to competitive information and considers not only the actual parameters of the company’s efficiency, but also functions, processes, tools, methods of achieving competitive advantages. Important advantages of benchmarking are a wide coverage of best practices and a partnership nature of relations with competitors. Benchmarking presupposes a dialogue, the result of which can be an increase in industry-wide quality standards, a joint study of the degree of customer satisfaction, the development of new products and technologies, and cooperation in various innovative directions. The relevance of this parameter lies with the fact that, in a constantly changing world, innovations help any business to stay competitive and increase the market share the company holds as well as fulfill its hidden potential.