Competitiveness Benchmarking
- Competitiveness is a measure of a company's ability to do business in the market place.
- Do you know your company’s level of competitiveness compared to that of your competitors?
Company Health Check (CHC) – Measuring Company Competitiveness
Enterprise Ireland can support you to benchmark your company against your sector through access to national and international SME norms. The Company Health Check (CHC) measures performance against your competition across a range of business functions and metrics including profitability, marketing, operations, innovation, productivity and human resources. It examines the practices in place and the performance being achieved from those practices.
Goal: To improve your competitive position.
A Company Health Check (CHC) will:
- measure your company’s performance compared to the competition.
- identifying strengths and weaknesses
- acting as a springboard for improving your competitiveness and growing your business.
It is ideal for companies that are embarking on a Lean Business initiative, it will identify what parts of the business need to be worked on, and will form the basis of an action plan for improvement activity. Companies that are embarking on a review of their strategic plan (or starting one) and want an independent review of the company’s strengths and weaknesses will also benefit.
How is it carried out?
A Competitiveness Benchmark Facilitator trained and approved by Enterprise Ireland will work with a small team within your business to capture the required data. All company data is protected with the utmost confidentiality. Your data will be compared against international norms and a feedback report will be provided.
Benchmarking Tools
- Probe - A powerful best practice benchmarking and assessment tool, powered by data from over 8,500 business users in 60 countries.
- Winning Measures - A Balanced Scorecard approach to provide fact based insight on your company’s competitiveness performance against international norms.
- Innovation Health Check - Designed to evaluate your innovation process. It looks at how the process operates from the outset, capturing customer needs (stated and unstated), idea generation, concept development, product/service development up to the commercial realisation stage and all steps in between.
- Marketing Health Check - Designed to give companies a measure of their marketing efforts. It looks at what they are doing well and where improvements can be made.
- Workplace Innovation Toolkit - An online questionnaire designed to facilitate self-evaluation of the capacity of a business to be an innovative workplace, under the four pillars of; employee engagement, innovation, productivity, and training.
What are the outcomes?
The feedback report establishes your company’s competitiveness against national and international standards for your sector and scale of business. You will get detailed comparisons with like companies and suggested actions to improve performance.
Many companies use the Enterprise Ireland Company Health Check to identify and prioritise problem areas in their business. Following a programme of improvement activity you can repeat the benchmarking process to monitor the improvements in performance.
Am I eligible?
This service is available to all Enterprise Ireland clients. It is available for both manufacturing and eligible internationally traded services companies.
What is the maximum funding available?
The cost of this service can be funded under the Strategic Consultancy Grant, up to 3 days for a full competitiveness benchmarking exercise to be completed by an approved benchmark facilitator, with an additional 2 to 3 days for the company to develop a strategy to address the improvement opportunities highlighted by the exercise. The cost of accessing the international databases is borne by Enterprise Ireland.
How do I apply?
If you are interested in measuring your company's competitiveness and you are an Enterprise Ireland client company, please contact your Development Adviser
If you are not already a client of Enterprise Ireland, please contact your nearest Enterprise Ireland regional office.
More information/contact
For further information on competitiveness benchmarking, email: benchmarking@enterprise-ireland.com
Best Practice Study Visits
Enterprise Ireland Best Practice Study Visits are an ideal mechanism to see highly competitive companies in action, they provide access to world class and aspiring world class companies that are embracing lean to improve their competitive position. They enable first-hand experience of Lean & Green Best Practice and provide solid and practical examples that participants can apply to their own businesses. Check out: Best Practice Study Visits.
