There are few lists that are more impactful to the importance of product benchmarking in the automotive industry than that of iSeeCars. While the automotive research firm is a consumer resource, their review of millions of recalls issued over the past 31 years has a profound impact on how manufacturers approach benchmarking.
Product Benchmarking, also referred to as “best practice benchmarking” is an evaluation process of a manufacturer that is measured against the process of its competitors or peers within a given industry. The goal is to create and implement improvement plans and best practices to increase performance in the production lifecycle, and/or other manufacturing and business processes and practices. By discovering the best achievable performance, process gaps can be eliminated.
While product benchmarking in the automotive industry traditionally involves other manufacturers, its primary purpose is to positively impact internal processes. Consequently, benchmarking can be based on internal measurement where cooperative manufacturing process benchmarks of other manufactures is a secondary measure. This goes to the heart to understanding the purpose and use of benchmarking. Often benchmarking is focused on the manufacturing process itself to:
- Improve quality
- Decrease manufacturing times
- Reduce Scrap and rework
- Increase production
Clearly in any benchmarking study, the choice of which attributes to measure is of paramount importance. This centers on a set of performance measures and often how closely a plant adhered to the “lean production model”. This would involve three primary areas including productivity, quality and time. From this the following best practices can be applied for benchmarking to ensure the right approach and the right outcome measurement.
BEST PRACTICES
- Obtain a detailed understanding of current process performance gaps to determine benchmarking points.
- Provide thorough documentation of benchmarking objectives and scope.
- Generate thorough current process documentation to avoid waste of time and resources as well as lossof project focus.
- Deliver primary metrics agreement to gauge pre- and post-gap analysis, track progress and improvements and institute measurement system analysis. (MSA)
While these are just the primary best practices of benchmarking that effect the widest spectrum of advanced manufacturing processes, it is the manufacturing production lifecycle that is often at the heart of inefficiency concerns in the automotive industry. Increasingly, tools such as 3D laser scanners are integral part of the benchmarking process. These tools are integral to benchmarking that enables identifying, implementing and assessing QA/QC improvements that increase efficiencies, reduce cycle times and ultimately lower costs due to decreased scrap, rework and recalls..
