PRODUCTS & SERVICES
- Probe for Manufacturing
- Probe for Service
- Probe for Micro Business
- Probe for Agriculture
- Including Red Meat, Cereals and Dairy businesses
- Probe for Public and Not for Profit Services
- Including Healthcare and Learning Providers
- Probe for Sustainability
- Probe for Leadership and People Management
- From Benchmarking to Improvement
- Including Action Planning and the Tipping Point Workshop — developing change management capability
- Customisation of Best Practice Benchmarking tools and services
PROBE for Benchmarking Agri-food Businesses
Bringing World Class Best Practice Benchmarking to Agri-food.
Working closely with some key change agents in the Agricultural and Food Sector, Comparison International has developed Best Practice Benchmarking services tailored to the needs of a range of agri-food businesses.
Recognising the particular characteristics of businesses in agri-food supply chains, these services are based around modular tools, enabling businesses to identify strengths and improvement opportunities across the range of applicable business processes:
- Organisation & culture
- Service concept & processes
- Service delivery
- Service value & measurement
- Material processing
- Logistics
- New product development
Additional questions test out sector-specific hypotheses, and PROBE practice and performance questions cover industry specific quality assurance schemes as well as international standards such as the ISO series. Agri-food sectors now have a highly valuable tool for analysing and improving business practice and industry performance. The UK's Meat and Livestock Commission, the Home Grown Cereals Authority, Dairy UK and Food From Britain (Horticulture) have all used tailored PROBE benchmarking tools as their post-farm gate benchmarking product.
The Benefit And Value
Comparison's PROBE Best Practice Benchmarking services for agri-food enable direct comparison with other participants within and beyond the industry, with competitive positioning providing individual companies with a clear picture of where they stand relative to best in class and world class.
The PROBE facilitated self assessment workshops help participants from diverse business areas and roles to generate consensus scores for their organisation, driving comparison and cross-functional learning for the organisation. The team identifies their competitive position within their industry and against world class, builds a strong understanding of exactly what constitutes best practice, and generates key actions to drive improvements in weaker areas.
As more businesses complete PROBE Best Practice Benchmarking, each sector body gains powerful understanding of positioning in aggregate, with gap analyses pinpointing performance shortfalls and practice-improvement opportunities to drive performance gains.
Example Use & Benefit
Companies in the UK red meat industry project focused on management development as a key action area whereas the cereals sector tended to focus on performance measurement, each individual company endeavouring to push closer towards identifying with best practice in these key areas.
In each of these sector-based initiatives, PROBE is used as the diagnostic fore-runner to either internal company-based improvement work or sponsored sector-wide initiatives such as Lean Manufacturing Programmes or Value Chain Analysis workshops.
To date, the following Agri-food sector Best Practice Benchmarking services are available:
- PROBE for Red Meat businesses
- PROBE for Cereals businesses
- PROBE for Diary businesses
PROBE Best Practice Benchmarking services can be customised for other types of business and for other sectoral or special purpose needs. To discuss your needs please contact us.