How to excel: Compare, compile, conduct

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A reliable benchmarking project ultimately needs one major component: a current, well-maintained and comprehensive database. The WBA Aachener Werkzeugbau Akademie maintains such a database for the global tooling industry and has analysed over 1,000 data sets of German tool shops in the past five years as well as data of more than 3,000 tool shops outside of Germany. A large number of well-known companies as well as many quiet achievers have been evaluated for the purpose of improvement.

In order to compare a company to similar tool shops, individualised comparison groups have to be defined at the start of each benchmarking project. The more thorough the selection of comparison groups is, the more precise are the statements regarding the performance within the competitive environment. Usually, the KPIs (key performance indicators) of three comparison groups are taken into assessment: Average KPIs of relevant competitors, average KPIs of best-practice tool shops and the overall industry average.

To obtain the data for assessment, the company has to supply a broad range of financial and technological indicators. In order to assess the validity of the supplied numbers and gain an unadulterated impression of the location and staff, an on-site audit is mandatory. An evaluation of, for example, material and process flows, visual and shopfloor management as well as use of digital support systems is conducted to promote the discovery of fields of improvement.

Once the data acquisition and on-site audit are completed, the results are analysed from an organisational and a technological perspective. The organisational perspective consists of fields such as strategy, service range, success factors, cost structure and human resources, while tool characteristics, CAx-competencies and the application of technology are part of the technological perspective.

Around 100 KPIs are usually necessary to assess a tooling company in all of its facets and compare it genuinely with the comparison groups. Due to size and sector-independent calculation algorithms, even those comparisons of different company sizes and tooling sectors are meaningful. The results of the analysis are shown in an extensive report.

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