Please provide at least two detailed responses to other students' posts about benchmarking. When responding to other posts, first comment on any points of agreement. Then comment on what you believe could also be improved based on what was presented.

1) Identify a specific company that the firm could use to benchmark a process.

The company I am currently working for is General Dynamics (GD) and I have been in this company for 13 years. GD is a global aerospace and defense company that provides military grade weapons, technologies, and services to the US military and other foreign country who purchased our products. Our managers' approach when it comes to the company's maintenance workflows and processes are beyond what the technical manuals required. The quality of the inspections by our technicians to the customers' vehicles can exposed and highlighted some of the problems that only highly trained employees can find. In addition to the high standard inspection, our team can also provide advice, recommendation, and solution to our customers. Because of our excellent performance in the field of maintenance, US Army leaders are constantly seeking our services and always renewed our contract.

• You need to describe what process or processes the company would want to improve.

Our maintenance processes begin when the US Army hired GD to perform a thorough inspection in their M1 Abrams main battle tank. Because the tank is a combat vehicle, military leaders always wanted their equipment in an excellent condition so their soldiers can complete their mission without encountering any major maintenance issue, however, soldiers have a habit of ignoring some faults during their inspection. These faults if ignored could potentially cause major failure of the equipment and expensive repair when not address properly. As a result of negligence, important training gets delayed due to down equipment.

When GD technicians begin their high-quality inspection on each vehicle, they write down all the faults they can find. Even small faults that are not considered detrimental to the overall performance of the vehicle (i.e., missing straps or loose screws) are all included in their inspection even though it is not mentioned in the technical manuals. The outcome of the inspection can expose and highlighted the true condition of their equipment that most of time it catches the attention of their high-ranking officers (e.g., colonel or general). Thanks to the rigorous training program that were received by every technician on the day he or she was hired. The initial training, they received e.g., theory of operations, extensive classroom lectures, hands on experience, familiarity of the vehicle, and continuous improvement were all designed to vastly improve their overall skills and trained their eyes to look for those hard-to-find problems.

The framework of our training program is based on what the customers' needs and the repeated success of each mission resulted in continuous renewal of our contract. Because of a proven track record of success, our training program can be benchmark by other firms who are striving to become more competitive and have a strong desire for world-class performance. If the company wanted to improve the skills of their employees, a correct training program that is designed to sharpen the skills needed to perform the assigned tasks will result in a high-quality standard of work.

• Discuss how you would go about collecting data and how the results could be used to improve the company.

I think understanding the existing processes, practices, and awareness of customers' needs are critical when collecting data. Before benchmarking, a management approval must be obtained then select the processes to be benchmarked. Identifying the weakness and strongest processes as well as documenting it are equally important. The next step is forming the benchmarking team that can do research and can select the best-in-class benchmarking partner. Once the right partner was selected, an agreement between the two companies must be formed before collecting any data. Analyzing the collected data and establishing that gap by thoroughly comparing the two processes will enable the team to form a conclusion that there is no doubt the partner's process is superior and can raise important questions about the cost, impact to the company, and how to support the change. Once all the questions were answered, the team needs to create the plan and take actions to close or surpass the gap. The last steps are to implement the change, continuously monitoring it, make adjustments along the way, and keep updating the processes as needed. By doing these, it can vastly improve the company's performance.

• Also, discuss at least one potential challenge with benchmarking.

I think the potential challenge in benchmarking is commitment of everyone that are involve in the process. Implementing an improvement especially big changes will surely encounter resistance to change by employees who will be impacted by the change. Therefore, effective communication between workers and leaders are very important when transitioning to the new processes. If everyone involve in the change are not fully committed, the company will be going to end up wasting everyone's time, effort, and valuable resources.

George Abanto

Resources

General Dynamics. (n.d.). About GD. Retrieved March 12, 2023, from https://www.gd.com/about-gd

Goetsch, D. L., & Davis, S. (2020). Quality Management for Organizational Excellence (9th ed.). Pearson Education (US); Chapter Twenty. MBS Direct. Retrieved March 16, 2023, from, https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9780135577424

2)Benchmarking is a tool that is used to find the best way to achieve optimal performance within your company (Stroud, 2010). I am an inspector at a maintenance shop that supports the national guard. We have 15 shops like mine all around the state of Louisiana and there is one person at each shop that holds the inspector position. We have annual meetings where we meet at a central location and have classes and seminars. As I've said before, my employer is DOD and we are not in business to make money but our goal is to make the best use of taxpayers' money with as little waste, fraud, and abuse as possible.

We also use this time to do the internal benchmarking process to see what other shops are doing to save time, or man-hours, and money on parts. We share troubleshooting processes that are much faster than our manuals lead us through and we also share how to repair inexpensive internal parts of components instead of spending the extra money and replacing the entire component itself.

The area that DOD can improve on is reducing waste of time and money. To figure out how to minimize man-hours and waste, we could use timesheets that account for every 15-minute increment throughout the day, we could use part trackers to figure out what common parts we order and we also could keep track of how many times a work order is reopened on the same vehicle with the same fault. To collect the data, we use an operating system called GCSS-Army that all these reports can be derived from and used in a manner to pinpoint exactly who is wasting time and money and in what areas their inspection sections are failing in. These reports can be easily retrieved but there isn't anyone at headquarters that goes the extra mile to see who needs to step up their performance and better learn their trade. Referring to our annual meetings, we could easily use these reports along with our collaborative findings throughout our own shops where we could improve. The results of the findings could greatly save the taxpayers money and funds could be spent on other areas to improve our country's state. The only issue with benchmarking an issue in my line of work is how to effectively capture the perfect data to make real determinations about someone's performance. There are so many extra tasks that each of us do for our respective shops like environmental specialist, additional duty safety officer, master driver, and the list goes on that takes up a significant amount of time and our focus on our main job is often interrupted. Thank you for reading.

Resource

Stroud, J. Delayne. (February 26, 2010). ISixSigma. Understanding the Purpose and Use of Benchmarking. Retrieved from https://www.isixsigma.com/benchmarking/understanding-purpose-and-use-benchmarking/