The teardown was finished in March. Forty pages, every component weighed, photographed and costed. In September, purchasing asks what the competitor pays for the same housing. Sales wants to know how the rival prices the same function. The report exists. The engineer who wrote it has moved to another project.
And the question on the table is the one that should have been answered in March: so what do we do differently?
If you work in benchmarking, you know this moment. The analysis was right. It just never reached the decision.
The short answer: benchmarking still pays off for companies that build complex products, when its results reach the people who decide. Below: what a good comparison is worth, where that value leaks, and a 30-minute test for your next study.
What a Good Comparison Is Worth
The gains are measurable, and they are rarely only about cost. Boston Consulting Group reports three client cases that show the range:
- Where you are behind: a medical technology manufacturer found an 8% cost disadvantage in materials, direct labour and overhead, and warranty-related reliability costs 30% higher than its main competitor’s.
- Where you are ahead: the same study showed a 10% advantage in servicing its installed base, a strength worth protecting.
- What it adds up to: a construction equipment manufacturer identified potential savings of 8% overall and up to 25% in individual supply categories. A locomotive manufacturer whose cross-functional team set a top-down cost target reduced costs by 28% against its forecast baseline.
These are BCG’s reported cases, not averages, and the construction equipment figures are potential savings. But they show what one structured comparison can put on the table.
Where the Value Leaks
Most benchmarking teams do not lose value in the analysis. They lose it afterwards, in three places.
- Collected, not used. In a 2016 BARC survey of 710 respondents, people estimated that 50 percent of their organizations’ available data is used for decision-making, and 40 percent in large companies.
- Used, not shared. In APQC’s survey of more than 200 organisations, only 22.2% reported benchmarking findings throughout the entire organisation; 36.4% kept them at unit or division level. McKinsey authors described as early as 2009 how companies used teardowns to dismantle silo culture in product development.
- Shared, not kept. In a 2022 vendor survey of 1,000 IT respondents in the UK and US, 64% felt their organisation had already lost knowledge when people left. In benchmarking, that is the engineer who knew where the March report was.
GOBENCH customers describe the same leaks. thyssenkrupp set out to turn “the individual knowledge of individual employees into organizational knowledge that everyone in the company can access”. Continental, a GOBENCH user since 2012, had outgrown an in-house solution on a SharePoint server.
How to Benchmark Faster and Better
GOBENCH is the cloud benchmarking and competitive intelligence platform by INDEC, built across two decades of industrial benchmarking practice. It addresses each leak directly.
- One source for every team. Your data, your structure: a customisable information architecture built around how your business actually works, so engineering, purchasing and sales finally work from the same source.
- Side by side, not file by file. Vehicles, components, electronics and machinery are compared side by side, with teardown and cost analysis, price positioning and innovation trends in one place.
- Faster input. LensSearch identifies a part from a single photograph, and DocuFlow turns documents into data.
Mercedes-Benz describes benchmarking as “a continuous process to improve our products through evaluated benchmark results”. Robert Camp, who defined the discipline, used the same word: continuous. A platform pays off when the tenth comparison is faster than the first, because the structure is already there and every team can read it.
Your 30-Minute Test
Take the last competitor study your company completed.
- Ask three people. One in engineering, one in purchasing, one in sales. Ask each, separately, where the results are stored and which version is current.
- Time the search. Note how long each needs to find the numbers.
- Ask one more question. Which decision did this study change? If the answers point to different files, different versions or no decision at all, the gap is not in your analysis. It is in your structure.
To see what that structure looks like with your own data, book a virtual demo at indec-group.com.
Compare cost. Track performance. Spot the gaps before your competitors do.
Sources
- Myerholtz, Tevelson and Wood, The Design-to-Value Advantage: Developing Winning Products with the Best Economics, Boston Consulting Group, 19 January 2016.
- BARC, How Much Information Available to Companies Is Used for Decision-Making?, BARC research panel, n=710, 2016.
- APQC, APQC Survey Reveals Why Organizations Benchmark and Common Reporting Techniques, 21 April 2010, reporting the State of Benchmarking 2009 survey.
- Fedewa, Kothari and Narayanan, Squeezing more ideas from product teardowns, McKinsey Quarterly, July 2009.
- Sinequa, Sinequa finds over two-thirds of IT leaders are concerned by organizational knowledge loss from employee turnover, press release, 9 August 2022.
- Joe Flower, We can do better: An interview with Robert Camp, The Healthcare Forum Journal, January-February 1993.
- INDEC, GOBENCH customer statements: thyssenkrupp, Continental, Mercedes-Benz.
