Question

Quality Concepts in Action Scenario

As a quality manager, it is your responsibility to educate your organization about benchmarks—what they are, what they mean, and how they should be used. Pay for Performance (P4P) is based on benchmarks. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) dictates benchmarks. Insurers target benchmarks. Many organizations have established internal benchmarks. What data and processes would you use to explain that:

• benchmarks are goals to be achieved;
• benchmarks are used for comparison among organizations;
• benchmarks are data based; and
• benchmarks should be used for performance improvements?

Deliverables

in addition to addressing the points above, discuss the barriers you might encounter implementing a benchmark process, and how you would overcome those barriers.  Your job is to convince your audience (your peers and your instructor) of the value of your proposed plan for improvement.    

Answer 1

answer-

Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost. Benchmarks are goal oriented because it sets goals for us to achieve in the organization.for example- for a salesperson the goal is set to sell 5 cars in a month that it would his benchmark. Benchmark is also used in comparing performance of other organization like Amazon can compare its performance with Walmart to see what is the profit, cost, revenue etc in a specific period of time.

Benchmark is data based because we requires statistics, financial data, customer data and other sort of data to set benchmarks as well measure the benchmarks. for example- Past sales data will help us to set future benchmarks to set new sales target in an organization based on past data.Benchmarks is required to improve the performance of employees as well as organization because it set standards which employees and organizations has to cross and show a high performance.

The barriers which an organization may encounter while implementing benchmarking process is the lack of motivation of employees, communication barriers, lack of data to make full use of benckmarks, support from top management to the lower level of the organization. these factors hinders the benchmarking process and reduce its effectiveness and if these were removed then benchmarking process would be effectively implemented.