Richard Keegan - Becoming Lean: Practical Steps to Build Competitiveness

Richard Keegan works for Enterprise Ireland, helping Irish businesses improve their efficiency and effectiveness. He is well-known internationally for his work and teaching on benchmarking and best practice. He has several published business books to his name, which have been translated into Italian and Portugese, as well as being published in India.

His account of his participation in the Iron Butt Rally 2007 11,000 miles in 11 days across America on his Honda Gold Wing motorcycle is told in BUTT SERIOUSLY: First Time Out on the Iron Butt Rally: An Irishmans Story, published by Oak Tree Press as an ebook ISBNs 978 1 904887 50 8 (PDF), 978 1 904887 51 5 (ePub), ISBN 978 1 904887 52 2 (Kindle).

INTROScope is a simple benchmarking tool, designed to introduce people working in a wide variety of businesses and organisations to the power of benchmarking.

Using a sample of questions drawn from some of the best available benchmarking tools, INTROScope invites you (perhaps with a few colleagues) to assess some of your organisations key practices and performance aspects against a model of best practice, and to discover how your assessments compare to those of hundreds of other organisations. Start by confirming the scope of your assessment, which could be a department, site or the whole organisation it will work at any of these levels, so long as you are consistent.

If you find INTROScope and its outputs useful, ask about the range of more sophisticated benchmarking tools from which you can select one suitable for your needs. You will have to invest a little more effort, but you are likely to find this well worthwhile as benchmarking results help you to shape your improvement plans with confidence.

For each topic in the questionnaire (below), you choose the statement most appropriate to your organisation / site. This gives you a score the number in the dark band above: 1, 3, or 5. Sometimes, you may feel that your organisation is between two statements. In this case, choose the number between the two statements: 2 or 4.

If you see differences across your organisation, where some areas are more advanced than others, it is best to assess an average position. For example, a pilot implementation does not warrant the maximum score of five. You are trying to assess your position TODAY, not where it will be when current plans and projects deliver the results you expect. Benchmarking will only ever be of value to you if assessments are true reflections of the practices and performance of the organisation as it is NOW.

INTROScope questions are drawn from the longer questionnaire scripts used by five of the best available benchmarking tools:

• Manufacturing Microscope.
• Service Microscope.
• The Micro Business Review.
• Manufacturing PROBE.
• Service PROBE.