Benchmarking allows your company to assess where you stand competitively against various measures, including Industry Best Practices that lead to superior performance. Benchmarking highlights areas of opportunity affecting the management process to strengthen your company's capability to build and produce. IPA conducts the competitive benchmarking to compare your company's performance with the performance of competitors and to understand what drives best performance. IPA uses our Project Evaluation System® (PES®) to conduct both qualitative and quantitative analyses that measure the effectiveness of a capital project system. These studies help your company better understand how you actually conduct capital projects, how other companies conduct projects, and how your approaches and procedures compare with those of Industry.

The overall objective of an IPA benchmarking is to understand the effectiveness of the practices and procedures employed by your company in planning, defining, engineering, constructing, and starting up capital projects. These practices and procedures are what we call the "Project System." A project system that functions well provides a company with a competitive advantage in terms of capital and unit product costs, better quality facilities, and better responsiveness to business needs. Defining and measuring the practices of a company with industry enable IPA to measure the degree to which current practices provide a company with a competitive advantage or disadvantage. The resulting lessons learned can then be easily applied to work performed in-house and by engineering contractors.

The effect of a project system's quality is enormous. A poor project system can increase the total installed cost (TIC) of a project by 20 percent, whereas an excellent project system will reduce the TIC by 20 percent. A poor project system will typically have longer cycle times that can reduce the project's return on investment by 3 percent or more. An excellent project system operates with shorter cycle times and an increase in return on investment.

IPA believes that the best way to assess the effectiveness of a project system is to develop a database of projects to compare your company's actual project results and practices with a cross-cutting sample of industry projects.

HOW CAN YOUR COMPANY BENEFIT?

We expect project engineers and business managers to benefit most from the benchmarking process. IPA's experience and approach to benchmarking provide unique advantages, such as-

BENCHMARKING DELIVERABLES

IPA will prepare a written draft report about the analysis and recommendations. Presentations of the results will be prepared and delivered: one to the assembled project teams and one to the benchmarking team (and other possible groups to be determined). Benchmarking provides companies with: