BENCHMARKING PORTAL

Introduction
Our Benchmarking Service and Portal is aimed at three communities:

1. Large corporates with multiple sites who want to conduct internal benchmarking programmes across different locations.
2. Trade and professional bodies who want to run bespoke benchmark programmes across their membership.
3. Service providers and consultancies who want to generate revenue by creating syndicated benchmark programmes across their client base.

The portal supports every step of the benchmarking process from inception to report production and can be branded to suit the client’s needs.

The following diagram shows the major steps in a typical benchmark campaign, supported by the InsightNow  portal.

Creation
Users can create a campaign by selecting an existing one from the library and assigning participants or by developing one from scratch. Campaigns can be run by any attribute, such as location, function, size etc. This means that campaigns can be varied to suit the benchmarking needs.

The questions are the lowest level of construct, meaning they can be readily re-used across multiple campaigns. Questions are maintained in a library and users can select or modify existing ones or create new questions and responses, all managed under strict change control.

The flow from one question to another can be linear or conditional on the response from a previous question.

Publish and Completion Manager
Having designed the campaign and the questionnaire, publication and completion are managed by an on-line dashboard that shows the status of every open benchmark for each of the participants. Users can control the completion by allocating sections to different people and at any point in the process the results can be saved, resumed, previewed and printed prior to final submission.

Validation
The portal supports various levels of on-line validation to ensure that the integrity of the data entered is as high as possible. This can be as simple as checking percentages add up to 100, or by comparing the new data to previous results or other responses to spot any incompatibility. The final stage of the validation is performed when all the responses have been received to identify outliers and produce exception reports which can be viewed from the portal to enable the participants to either modify their responses in the case of a data entry error or add commentary explaining the variance.

Analysis
The portal allows users to analyse their results by a number of dimensions that typically include:

• Time.
• Location.
• Sector.
• Function.
• Size.
• Maturity.

The ability to filter the results means that users can select who they want to be in their peer group for comparison.

The analysis tools supports pre-defined tables and graphs, with options to change the type of graph displayed.  It also offers comparisons against historical trends by selecting the periods over which the historical data is used to compare against current results. We also provide a dynamic query capability that allows analysts within the client community to really get under the skin of the data and identify potential key relationships and correlations. For instance what are the key drivers of customer satisfaction?

The final part of the analysis process is about using the data to drive change by identifying best practice and running “what-if?” analysis to assess what the impact of changing one Key Performance Indicator would be on a key business outcome such as cost. Having gained this insight, performance improvement targets can be set for the next period.

Publish
The portal supports report templates that enable users to select charts, data tables and commentary and create Word, PowerPoint or Adobe documents. This dramatically speeds up the time required to produce a report. If there are no changes in the data views required from one benchmark period to the next then the reports can be generated by the push of a button with only the commentary to be updated.

Benefits

• The cost of benchmarking is reduced and the integrity of the data collection is increased.
• Clients are in full-control of the data analysis and reporting.
• The benchmarking emphasis moves from collection of historical data to analysis and driving best practice performance improvements.