Benchmarking: Can it increase the company financial performance?

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the use of benchmarking in Czech enterprises and the effect of its use on the financial performance of companies. The article defines benchmarking and states it as currently one of the most used and effective tools to support business performance. An extensive questionnaire survey carried out by the Faculty of Management and Economics of TBU in Zlin (a total of 350 enterprises in the Czech Republic) found that the use of benchmarking in the Czech Republic is still relatively low and there are not differences among companies with different specialization and different age and their use of benchmarking. It was proved that larger companies use benchmarking to a greater extent than smaller companies. Although enterprises using benchmarking are reaching higher sample median profitability, the differences in the achieved performance cannot be considered as significant as series of Wilcoxon tests show.