Week 10: Stop Benchmarking. Start Understanding Your Own Process.
Stop Benchmarking. Start Understanding Your Own Process.
I am going to tell you about the worst consulting recommendation I ever witnessed.
A logistics company. Mid-sized. Growing. Struggling with delivery performance -- on-time delivery was sitting at 78%, and the industry benchmark was 94%. Leadership was frustrated. Customers were complaining. Something had to change.
So they hired a benchmarking consultancy.
The consultants spent three months studying best-in-class logistics companies. They produced a 120-page report with detailed comparisons. Warehousing practices. Route optimisation strategies. Technology platforms. Staffing models. KPI frameworks. The report was thorough, professional, and impressively bound.
The recommendation: adopt the practices of Company X, the industry benchmark leader. Implement their warehouse layout. Copy their route planning methodology. Install their WMS platform. Restructure the shift pattern to match theirs.
The company spent eight months and a significant six-figure sum implementing these recommendations.
On-time delivery went from 78% to 76%.
It got worse.
Not because Company X's practices were bad. They were excellent -- for Company X. But Company X had different product sizes, different delivery distances, different customer requirements, different infrastructure, different workforce demographics, and different demand patterns.
The logistics company had spent eight months and serious money copying someone else's answer to someone else's problem. And in doing so, they had distracted themselves from understanding their own process -- which was where the actual solutions were hiding.
I have seen versions of this story in at least a dozen organisations over my career. Different industries, same mistake. And it keeps happening because benchmarking feels productive, feels rigorous, and gives leadership a target to point at.
But benchmarking, as it is practiced in most organisations, is one of the most overrated activities in business.
The Benchmarking Illusion
Here is what benchmarking actually does in most cases.
It gives you someone else's number without any context for how they achieved it.
"The benchmark for changeover time in our industry is 12 minutes." Fine. But what equipment are they using? What product mix are they running? How many changeovers per shift? What is their staffing level? What maintenance regime supports it? What training programme built the capability?
Without understanding all of that context, the benchmark number is meaningless. It is a number without a story. And a number without a story is not information -- it is decoration.
At Shell, we had access to extensive internal benchmarking data across global operations. Facility versus facility. Region versus region. Process versus process. And the most important lesson I learned from all of that data is this: the number tells you almost nothing. The process behind the number tells you everything.
Two facilities could have identical throughput numbers but completely different processes producing that throughput. One could be efficient and well-controlled. The other could be chaotic and compensating through overtime, rework, and heroic individual effort. The benchmark number would show them as equal. The reality was completely different.
Copying Is Not Improving
Let me be very direct about this.
Benchmarking is copying. It is looking at someone else's test paper and writing down their answer.
The problem is that the question on your test paper is different.
Your process has specific constraints, specific capabilities, specific failure modes, specific bottlenecks, and specific waste that is unique to your operation. Some of it will be similar to other organisations. Much of it will not. And the improvement approach that works for your specific situation will be different from the approach that worked for someone else.
When I was deploying CI across Shell, the most impactful improvements were never the ones that came from benchmarking. They were the ones that came from deeply understanding the specific process, identifying the specific waste, and developing a specific countermeasure.
I watched a team at one facility reduce their changeover time by 40%. Not by benchmarking against another facility. By standing at the machine, watching the changeover happen, timing every step, identifying the waste, and redesigning the sequence. Their solution was specific to their equipment, their product, their layout, and their team. Nobody else could have copied it because nobody else had the same configuration.
That is what real improvement looks like. Not copying a number. Understanding a process.
The Three Benchmarking Traps
After 40+ organisations, I have identified three specific traps that benchmarking creates.
Trap One: The destination without a map.
A benchmark gives you a target -- "we should be at 94% on-time delivery" -- but tells you nothing about how to get there. The gap between 78% and 94% is not a number problem. It is a process problem. And the process work required to close that gap is unique to your operation.
I saw this repeatedly. Leadership would come back from a benchmarking study energised about the gap and completely unequipped to close it. They knew where they should be. They had no idea how to get there. Because the benchmarking study told them the what but not the how.
Trap Two: The wrong priority.
Benchmarking often directs your attention to the gap between you and the benchmark. But that gap might not be your most important problem.
I worked with a manufacturing company that benchmarked everything -- quality, throughput, OEE, inventory turns, lead time. They identified their biggest gap as inventory turns and spent a year working on it. Meanwhile, their biggest actual problem was changeover time, which was causing them to run larger batches, which was causing excess inventory, which was dragging down their inventory turns.
The benchmark told them the symptom. The process told them the cause. They spent a year on the symptom because the benchmark pointed that way.
Trap Three: The excuse to stop thinking.
This is the most dangerous trap. Once leadership has a benchmark number, they stop asking "what is possible?" and start asking "how do we reach the benchmark?"
Those are very different questions.
"What is possible?" is open-ended. It invites investigation, creativity, and deep process understanding. The answer might be better than the benchmark. The answer might be a completely different metric. The answer might reveal that the benchmark itself is measuring the wrong thing.
"How do we reach the benchmark?" is closed. It assumes the benchmark is the right target, frames improvement as gap-closing rather than capability-building, and limits your ambition to someone else's achievement.
At Shell, one of the most powerful phrases I heard from a senior leader was: "I do not care what the benchmark says. I care what our process is capable of. Let us find out."
That mindset produced improvements that exceeded every benchmark. Because the team was not trying to match someone else's answer. They were discovering their own.
What to Do Instead
I am not saying you should never look at external data. Industry comparisons have value -- they can indicate whether you are in the right universe, whether your expectations are reasonable, and whether there are capabilities you have not considered.
But the sequence matters enormously.
Step one: Understand your own process first. Map it. Measure it. Walk it. Talk to the people who operate it. Identify the waste. Find the bottlenecks. Understand the failure modes. Know your process better than anyone.
Step two: Improve what you can see. Before looking externally, fix the obvious. The waste that is right in front of you. The seven types of waste that exist in every process. Overproduction. Waiting. Transport. Over-processing. Inventory. Motion. Defects. I guarantee you have enough internal waste to keep you improving for months before you need to look at what anyone else is doing.
Step three: Then -- and only then -- look externally for ideas, not answers. Use benchmarking for inspiration, not imitation. Look at what other organisations are doing and ask "Could something like that work in our context?" Not "Let us copy that."
The difference between inspiration and imitation is the difference between improvement and disappointment.
Be the Benchmark
Here is the mindset shift I want you to make.
Stop trying to reach someone else's benchmark. Become the benchmark.
Understand your process so deeply, improve it so relentlessly, and sustain the discipline so consistently that other organisations start benchmarking against you.
That is not arrogance. That is ambition directed inward. It is the belief that your process, your team, and your capability are worth investing in deeply -- not just compared to someone else's number.
When I was at Shell, the facilities that performed best were not the ones obsessed with benchmarking. They were the ones obsessed with their own process. They knew every step, every cycle time, every failure mode. They improved constantly. And when the benchmark data came out, they were already ahead. Not because they aimed at the benchmark. Because they aimed at their own potential.
How much time does your organisation spend studying what other companies do versus deeply understanding your own process? If the answer is "more time on benchmarking than on Gemba walks," you have just identified your biggest improvement opportunity.
Start with your own process. The Stormholt 30-Day Improvement Starter Guide gives you the tools to map, understand, and improve your specific operation.
https://stormholt.org/products/stormholt-30-day-improvement-starter-guide