About IBM Institute for Business Value Benchmarking Program
IBM is an international leader in business process performance measurement and optimization. The IBM Institute for Business Value provides a business process benchmarking service that helps clients measure their current state and compare their performance against peers; these benchmarking services can be provided as part of a process transformation initiative or similar engagement. This is a mature offering supported by robust content and specialized tools. Our patented custom survey method and toolset enable us to provide meaningful and accurate comparisons of performance tailored to the priorities of each client.
Through our benchmarking program, organizations can:
- Measure their current state using the open standard Process Classification Framework
- Assess their performance against external peer groups such as industry, region, revenue, or other criteria
- Learn from leading practices, based on fact-based, data-driven comparisons and recommendations
Benchmarking examples
Financial management:
- Finance function cost as a percentage of revenue
- Finance function resources as a percentage of total employees
- Cycle time to complete the annual budget cycle
- Cycle time to generate complete and correct billing data
- Invoice line items processed error free first time
- Cycle time to perform close
- Line items processed per “accounts payable” FTE
Supply Chain Management:
- Perfect order performance
- Logistics costs as a percentage of sales
- Cash-to-cash cycle time
- Inventory turn rates
- Demand forecast error
- Time to place a purchase order
Human Capital Management:
- Personnel costs per $1,000 revenue
- Budget of the HR function per $1000 revenue
- Cost of the process 'reward and retain employees' per $1000 revenue
- Learning management system cost as percentage of total HR system cost
- Percentage of HR staff time spent on work force planning
- Cycle time from job requisition to acceptance of job offer
- Satisfaction rate of new hires with the recruitment process
- Average learning days per employee
Product Development:
- Percentage of sales due to products/services launched in past year
- Time to profitability
- Time to market
- R&D spend as a percentage of revenue
- FTEs for product development (normalized by revenue)
- Percentage of all new product/service development projects launched as commercial products
Information Technology:
- Annual IT costs as percentage of revenue
- Distribution of IT FTEs among processes performed
- Distribution of IT costs among processes performed
- Average time to fulfill an information need (by level of complexity)
- Average time to break even for major new or enhanced IT services (by level of investment)
Marketing and Sales:
- Customer satisfaction
- Customer retention
- Customer advocacy
- Cost to sell by channel
- Sales budget as a percentage of revenue
- Sales cycle time in days
Benchmarking Briefs
Read about key findings from some of our recent benchmarking surveys.
- Enterprise Resource Planning Systems drive cost reduction and efficiency in Finance and Accounting Operations: Benchmark data quantifies the value of integrated software applications (847KB)
- Top five practices contributing to best-in-class order-to-cash performance (1019KB)
- Benchmarking study in Asia quantifies value from supply chain visibility and optimization (494KB)
- Benchmarking study demonstrates IT enablers and benefits from analytics capabilities (534KB)
- Benchmarking data reveals pharmaceutical industry not connecting social media data with marketing strategies (903KB)
- Benchmarking data demonstrate the benefits from cross-channel visibility into customer interactions (1.71MB)
- Supply chain benchmarks highlight the importance of analytics for optimized performance (106KB)
- IBM benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of Service Delivery Models for Finance and Operations (161KB)
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Open Standards Benchmarking assessments
IBM participates in an internationally recognized open standards benchmarking partnership with APQC (link resides outside of ibm.com), a not-for-profit research organization. The benchmarking content is built upon a standard cross-industry Process Classification Framework, enabling business performance to be compared across organizations and industries.