Role of Benchmarking and Target Setting

This chapter presents benchmarking and breakthrough methods with more emphasis on benchmarking, and it illustrates how targets are set for the development of future products. Benchmarking is a process of measuring products, services, or practices against the manufacturer’s toughest competitors, or those companies recognized as the industry leaders. From the information gathered during the benchmarking exercises, the product designers can realize the “gaps” between the characteristics and capabilities of the products of their competitors and their new product concepts. Whereas the breakthrough approach forces the design teams to look beyond the existing products and technologies and thus develop a totally new product or new features in the proposed product to achieve major improvements over the existing product designs. A tabular format is an effective method of displaying benchmarking data. It allows side-by-side comparison of all the products presented in the columns by considering the vehicle characteristic presented in each row of the table. Photo-benchmarking is also a useful method where photographs of the company’s product taken from different views of the product can be compared with photographs of benchmarked products from the same viewing locations to determine differences between product designs.