Page 8 - CIMA MCS Workbook February 2019 - Day 1 Suggested Solutions

CIMA FEBRUARY 2019 – MANAGEMENT CASE STUDY

the best performer offers a wider variety of treatments than Crowncare or their pricing is
at a discount to ours and so is more attractive for a similar quality service. We could also
ask customers whose business we lost to a competitor why they made the decision to use
the competitor instead of Crowncare.

Internal benchmarking.

This could be a very useful form of benchmarking for Crowncare. We have 30 different dental
practices, some of which will be performing better than others, especially given that many
practices would have been acquired and may not initially be working to the same standards as the
others.

Using internal benchmarking and measuring the performance of practices against the best one
should enable Crowncare to implement changes that will bring the lower performing practices up
to the same level as the better performing ones.

This would, however, involve the setting and measuring of targets to determine which practices
are indeed the better and worse performers in the first place.

Functional benchmarking.

In functional benchmarking, comparisons are made with a similar function (for example
marketing, customer service, appointment scheduling) in other organisations that are not direct
competitors.
For example, we could liaise with high performing doctors’ surgeries to see if there are any
procedures they use that could be of benefit in making Crowncare more efficient, with fewer
missed appointments and late arrivals. Because the surgeries are not direct competitors of
Crowncare, they may be willing to share more detailed information about their processes,
perhaps in return for information about Crowncare’s best processes.

Strategic benchmarking.

This is a form of competitive benchmarking aimed at reaching decisions for strategic action and
organisational change. Companies in the same industry might agree to join a collaborative
benchmarking process managed by an independent third party such as a trade organisation. With
this type of benchmarking, each business in the scheme submits data about their performance to
the scheme organiser. The organiser calculates average performance figures for the industry as a
whole and then supplies the participants with the average data. It could be a way for Crowncare
to get more detailed competitive information (albeit on an average basis) than with pure
competitive benchmarking and instead of just comparing ourselves on a revenue basis we could
determine our market position in other areas of performance.

58 KAPLAN PUBLISHING