In a product-oriented benchmarking, (mostly technological) products are analysed and compared regarding certain parameters. The goals is to identify potentials of inprovement, cost reduction, and innovation.
How does your company benefit from?
The consequent collection of detailed competitive information and of the originating performance potentials of one’s products represent one of the advantages of the execution of a product benchmarking. Through a comprehensive analysis, the range of the alternative solutions is extended and the company is made aware of existing improvement potentials that mostly exceed the initial expectations.
By means of a product benchmarking, your company is able to, inter alia:
- Develop new ideas for own products
- Increase functionality of ist own products
- Increase the cost efficiency of ist own products
- Identify and apply improvement potentials in the whole product development process
How do we proceed?
Initialization Workshop Product Benchmarking: Do you want to get to know the method, compare and analyze your own product in comparison, and this as quickly as possible? So, the initialization workshop is exact the right thing for you. In the two-day workshop, you and your team are guided through the methodical key aspects of the product benchmarking. In addition, during this time, you can already reach first analysis and benchmarking objectives. The workshop takes place either in Fraunhofer IPK or within your company.
Product Benchmaking
The procedure of such a project is divided into five phases, in which the objectives are set, an analysis as well as the comparison of the benchmarking objects are made and actions are identified. The goal-setting phase defines the specific objectives of the benchmarking project, based on the business objectives. Concluding the goal-setting phase, a project team is formed, consisting of employees of the company, the IZB and, eventually, of external consultants. Once the goals are defined, the benchmarking matrix can be prepared and finalized after the analysis of the own product . The selection of suitable comparison parameters as well as the actual comparison and the evaluation take place in the Comparison phase. Here, qualitative and quantitative, as well as technological characteristics can be examined. As a result, a strength-weakness profile is generated using a morphological box and a utility analysis, and merged into the benchmarking matrix. On this basis, suitable actions can be identified and put together in an action plan. The implementation of the actions is accompanied by a continuous project management, in order to ensure the achievement of objectives and to be able to make any adjustments regarding goals of follow-up projects.