Benchmarking practices of the winners

The second day of the second GBN Benchmarking Roadshow featuring an executive workshop on Structured Benchmarking (See: Seven organisations win Best Practices awards at GBN Benchmarking Roadshow) was dominated by the presentations of Best Practices at Castrol, Yes Bank, Birla White, Eureka Forbes, Tata Power, Hindustan Zinc and Aditya Birla Chemicals.

Castrol
Castrol is engaged in manufacturing and marketing of automotive, industrial and marine and energy lubricants and counts its Castrol Edge, Castrol Activ, Castrol Tection Globa, Castrol Hyspin, Castrol Cyltech 70 among the brand leaders. The company's mission is to be a global differentiated player focusing on material and sustainable markets leveraging its brand strength, consumer / customer relationships through a cost disciplined approach and among the best practices it has implemented to drive operational excellence are brand management, individual performance management, innovation, road safety, self advocacy and self certification.

The company's individual performance management practice comprises four key steps namely setting of objectives, performance discussions during the year, year-end assessment of performance and performance outcomes. The company rewards individual performance by first making an assessment of whether an employee's performance is below expectations, meets expectations, exceeds expectations or has been exceptional through a systematic performance appraisal.

Yes Bank
Yes Bank, which pursues a brand strategy to build one of the finest financial brands in India, has set its vision on being recongised as the ''best quality bank of the world in India''. The bank nurtures values of growth, trust, technology, knowledge driven human capital, transparency and responsible banking and aims to champion ''responsible banking'' in India where the concepts of corporate social responsibility and sustainability are integrated in the DNA of the organisation.

The 10 best practices the bank has implemented include, knowledge banking, leveraging technology for workforce empowerment, innovative recruitment and onboarding practices, total outsourcing and co-creation of value and mobile banking. Knowledge banking goes beyond the traditional realm of banking with Yes Bank's 'knowledge bankers' being industry experts. They offer incisive and in-dept insights into customer's business and are able to develop great ideas and nurturing them to fruition with the bank's mission.

Birla White
Birla White, a division of Grasim Industries Ltd, produces white cement, wall care putty, Kool n Seal, Textura, Level Plast and GRC. The company's vision is to be the most preferred supplier of quality products in the category and to achieve sales revenue of Rs1,000 crore by FY2010. The company strives to deliver superior value to customers, shareholder, employees and society at large with increased focus on living with the company's values. The company adopted the KIP-RADAR methodology to identify the benchmark units, selection of employees, and implementation of a systematic review process which resulted in changed outlook, empowerment of employees through learning and sharpening of skills for meeting the new business needs.