BENCH MARKING: WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

If you are like most business owners, you want to make improvements and grow your dealership. There is a very important four-letter word that is required to do this, DATA. In order to determine goals and higher standards for your business to reach, you need to track and know where you have already been. This is where benchmarking comes in. We’ve all heard the word bounced around, and may even be practicing it, but what does it really mean?

In a recent article published in the MHEDA Journal, Robin Currie of Currie Management Consultants says that a benchmark is simply defined as “a standard against which the performance of a company can be measured.” Widely recognized as an important business practice decades ago, benchmarking became a standard, required activity for all high-performing companies striving to stay competitive and grow.

According to Currie, financial benchmarking is the cornerstone of a sound company. By tracking, understanding and using data in their dealership management system, owners, executives and managers can identify areas of their business that are running well and those that need further attention.

The ASPEN dealership management system has endless tools to assist owners, managers and dealer principals with the benchmarking process. ASPEN’s VIsion Screens, Dashboard Widgets, Reports and Query Tool supply management with a variety of ways to track and mine data out of the system to get exactly the information needed. Below is an example of ASPEN’s Parts Analysis screen, comparing monthly inventory values that can be used to set benchmarks for the Parts Department. See more about ASPEN’s reporting and data mining tools.