You are at the start of a two-days training course on process benchmarking.  Benchmarking is a structured way of looking outside to what has made other organisations successful in order to identify, analyse and adopt the best in the industry of function. Adopting the process benchmarking way of looking outside may bring you a more systematic way of learning and thinking about how to innovate your business. However, this training may also have a great impact on your business. But this will only happen when you will systematically start-up process benchmarking project teams for radically improving specific processes in your company.

Objective
Benchmarking is the process of identifying, learning, and adapting outstanding practices and processes from any organisation, anywhere in the world, to help an organisation improve its performance. The objective of this training is that participants will learn how to apply benchmarking in their companies

Learning targets
At the end of the training program the participants will:

• Understand the principles of Process Benchmarking
• Be able to identify the business processes used by their organisation
• Be able to prioritise processes for improvement
• Be able to map and analyse processes to identify where benchmarking will enable the required performance improvements
• Be able to gather relevant benchmarking data from various sources
• Be able to incorporate the innovations learned from benchmarking into new improved business processes.

Planned outputs
At the end of the training program you will have developed a Benchmarking Project Plan to implement superior practices in your company. This Benchmarking Project Plan will help you to execute process benchmarking for your company, based on a performance gap analysis made with a Croatian consultant and the search for superior practices in other companies. More importantly, you will have acquired benchmarking skills that you can apply afterwards to continuously improve the performance of your company in a systematic way. The plan will be based on your analysis of your company.

Application of benchmarking involves four basic steps:

1. Understand in detail your own processes.
2. Analyse the processes of others.
3. Compare your own performance with that of others analysed.
4. Implement the steps necessary to close the performance gap.