Benchmarking your company’s processes against an industry leader, or adopting best practices from a best-in-class competitor are tried, but not always true, business management tools. To get the most from best-practice benchmarking, there are several temptations to avoid and many implementation issues to consider. Doing it right can ensure strong, long-term growth, instead of simply matching your competitors’ short-term results.

Imports don’t always fit

Recognizing best practices is easy. Implementing them is difficult. The task becomes downright impossible if you strictly analyze best practices in a vacuum, because even the most impressive statistics or inspired analysis will not guarantee effective implementation in your organization.

One of the biggest pitfalls of gleaning best practices from other companies is ignoring your own culture and circumstances. Adopting someone else’s solutions doesn’t always work. However, adapting or customizing them is often the better choice. To do that, it’s important to first understand the context that allows such practices to work in other organizations. Only then can you begin to determine whether they are right for you. Go behind the numbers to explore just how and why best practices elsewhere were initiated. In doing so, you’ll uncover what kinds of modifications might be necessary for fitting them to your group. At the same time, you may well discover that certain measures just aren’t appropriate or cost-effective for your company.

In any case, establishing the explanations behind what makes the best better requires a bit more time and effort, but such preparation is essential. Otherwise, you’ll gain nothing from simply taking up best practices based solely on measures that worked elsewhere. Worse yet, you could find yourself headed full speed down the wrong road. 

While you’re considering the performance of leaders elsewhere, remember that developing best practices can also be initiated internally. The best organizations pursue both opportunities to create meaningful, suitable improvements.

The right practices for the right reasons

Just because a company with worthy best practices is in your industry, doesn’t make it the right company to emulate. While it may be easier to model your practices after organizations within your field, there’s much to gain from excellent companies with very different core businesses than yours.

Going outside your familiar landscape for best practice ideas also eliminates the herding effect. In herding, competitors all benchmark their performances against one another, mimic product or service offerings, match advertisement strategies, and migrate to the same target markets. The result is that profits are soon divided among too many companies and diminished. Therefore, finding and assuming best practices from beyond your industry helps to protect your margins and maintains your value.

Before you can select relevant role models, evaluate each step of your customers’ buying process. Once you establish the factors at each step that most influence their perception of value, you can then adopt practices from companies that excel at those factors, no matter what industry they’re in. This also helps you home in on the practices that will make the biggest bottom-line impact for your company.

Finally, don’t invest so much on getting new best practices into place that you neglect the best practices that already work well for you.  

Stay current

Applying best practices, whether to increase efficiencies or productivity, is an evolving, dynamic process. To reap long-term benefits and ultimate earnings, it’s important to realize that times change--this year’s best practices may only be standard practice next year. Go beyond present performance ideas to ensure your organization’s future growth.