Over the last 25 years, the Tata Group has been involved in a journey of business excellence. It aims to make its companies sustainable and profitable by focusing on performance improvement across business processes and results. A critical element of the journey is the Tata Best Practices & Benchmarking Programme, which was conceptualised to partner with companies and enable their acceleration towards world-class performance, through business excellence. Benchmarking enables improvements by providing information to identify business processes to drive breakthrough levels of performance effectively. Benchmarking plays a vital role in the 'learning' dimension, both in evaluation and improvement, which leads to innovation.
TBExG facilitates a culture of continuous improvement and transformation by engaging with Tata companies for benchmarking key business metrics and processes.
TBExG engages with Tata companies to facilitate benchmarking at two levels — process and performance.
Performance benchmarking
TBExG has partnered with American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) enabling Tata companies to measure and compare their performance with leading international organisations. APQC’s benchmarking assessments allow companies to compare their performance on more than 3,300 measures against global organisations, in nearly every industry. The operational key performance indicators, with detailed metrics for each functional area, are compared for peer organisations. More than 45 process areas including finance and accounting, human resources, product development, supply chain, IT, customer service, etc. are covered under performance benchmarking. The assessment report contains validated benchmarking information, which includes performance statistics, relative to contemporary entities in different industries, regions, and organisation-size peer groups.
Process benchmarking
Processes to be benchmarked are identified post analysis of high frequent OFIs in TBEM Assessment or areas of focus at the group level. Internal processes are benchmarked to provide companies with an independent perspective about how well they have performed, compared to other group companies. The internal benchmarking also throws up opportunities for best practice implementations.
| PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKING | PROCESS BENCHMARKING | |
| Collaboration | Partnered with APQC | TBExG internal assessment |
| Data Level | Detailed metrics for each functional area | High Level OFIs |
| Validation Time | 3 weeks | 6 weeks |
| Total Time | 5-6 weeks | 8-12 weeks |
| Deliverable | Robust report with industry, cross-industry, revenue and geographic peer groups | Individual company report with customised feedback for improvement areas |
APQC membership
TBExG has partnered with APQC – a world leader in transforming organisations – to enable Tata companies to learn from leading business entities, worldwide. With more than 40 years of experience, APQC is the world’s foremost authority in benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement, and knowledge management. APQC partners with more than 500 member establishments, globally, across industries.