Benchmarking

In order to grow both revenues and profits in a mercurial, globalizing energy marketplace fraught with volatility, competitive positioning is crucial. A company must understand not only where it stands relative to its competitors in terms of size and market share, but it must understand its strategic competencies upon which to devise a winning strategy. In other words, a company must understand fully the degrees of separation between its goals and where it stands relative to achieving those goals. To that end, benchmarking provides the information upon which strategic moves can be formulated.

Benchmarking is the process of determining who is best in class and why. In other words, who sets the standard? What is the standard? And, why is that standard a useful measure for comparison?

Modern best practices derive much from and build upon the discipline of benchmarking. In this specific regard, benchmarking can be defined as the process of identifying, understanding and adapting the best practices of leaders in the field in order to increase efficiency, improve performance and refine business processes.

A company may compare itself to its competitors in terms of production efficiency, supply-chain costs, monopolistic advantages, deep pockets, know-how, distribution infrastructure, barriers to entry, etc., in order to better understand how it measures up and how well prepared it is to meet the challenges ahead. However, that's only part of the story. Knowing which strategic advantages or competencies to exploit in order to develop a decisive edge in the marketplace requires measuring the company using an array of benchmarking scales, and then developing areas in which the company has the required resources with which to excel.

ZECG's knowledge-based energy information platform, combined with the many years of experience of the principals and executive consultants, enables the development of meaningful, accurate and reliable benchmarks for informed decision-making and strategy development.