How a cooperative competitive benchmarking study can help you improve your enterprise

Deloitte's mutual benchmarking service offering

Deloitte believes it is critical that you are able to base your decisions on current, relevant, and objective information — rather than anecdotal experience or internal corporate instinct alone.

Benchmarking has proven to be a valuable tool for finding out what your competitors or other peer companies are spending, where they are making investments, and where they are getting the biggest returns. Beyond investment amounts and categories, operational datasets from another organization can also help you discover domain-specific improvements for your own organization. For example, manufacturing clients often ask us how companies are taking advantage of the data from the physical sensors that are on the equipment that the companies have sold or rented out with a commitment to service the equipment.

Use-cases in M&A

Cooperative benchmarking provides unique and high-impact opportunities for companies looking to embark upon a joint venture or growth through a merger or acquisition. We recommend considering cooperative benchmarking and engaging very early—as soon as the M&A strategy is set. We have even helped clients test the hypothesis of whether inorganic growth is the right strategy through engagements in cooperative benchmarking facilitated by Deloitte.

Most companies have multiple candidates in mind to pursue a potential transaction. As such, the representatives from your company who are leading the benchmarking can congruently present it as a multiple-party cooperative benchmarking around the datasets relevant to the operational metrics which would be sought to be improved if the hypothesized synergies were realized.

Even if you have only one target in which you would be interested in order to fulfill the strategy, there are multiple reasons to invite additional companies to the benchmarking along with the target.

How to get started with cooperative benchmarking on your own

We strongly recommend that you obtain an antitrust advisor such as Deloitte prior to engaging in a cooperative benchmarking project with competitors and fellow customers of vendors, suppliers and service providers. Deloitte can fulfill the function and serve as your data escrow agent as well as analyze those collected datasets for you.

However, some clients wish to explore the idea a little bit with potential benchmarking invitees on their own before undertaking the expense of engaging Deloitte. Other clients, who may have already engaged Deloitte in past cooperative benchmarking efforts have wanted to know what they can do accelerate subsequent efforts and also reduce the engagement expenses. Deloitte has developed four data-readiness best practices for benchmarking sponsors to follow if you choose to connect with peer companies on target data to be shared prior to engaging Deloitte.