Benchmarking could be defined as a tool for competitive technical analysis of a product, service or process; a continuous and systematic evaluation method that the most efficient competitors or companies use for their own success. This technique can be very useful for a construction company because it is an industry where products, processes, and equipment continuously change.

Therefore, benchmarking objective would be the results optimization. Basically, it consists of learning, adapting, and implementing proven methods that have produced positive and innovative results in other companies.

For this, it is necessary to know how that process was developed and what practice made it achieve a high-level performance. It is about knowing in depth the factors that have made this improvement possible. This technique has achieved cost savings of approximately 30% in manufacturing and service industries, so it is reasonable to find savings of this magnitude applicable to the construction sector.

Benchmarking is based on the fact that it is difficult for a company to achieve superior results to its competitors in all its processes. In order to analyze these best practices, it is sometimes necessary to share information with companies that are not direct competition, addressing similar functions, problems or processes.

You can establish different types of benchmarking depending on various aspects. The most used classification deals with the existing relationship with the company or organization that participates in the study. Thus, one can distinguish between:

• Internal: compares processes within different areas of the same organization.
• Competitive: compares processes of competing entities in the same sector.
• Functional: compares processes between non-competing organizations in the same sector.
• Generic: compares processes between companies from different sectors.

It is a mistake to consider that this technique consists in the mere data comparison. It is about identifying, internalizing, and adapting the best practices to our company in order to generate a climate of adaptation and constant learning.

Despite the above, there are some intrinsic problems that may hinder the adoption of benchmarking within the sector.

First, each project is unique, designed for a specific location, which may suggest that construction processes may also be so.

Another difficulty is the lack of practice in identifying best practices and how to measure processes with indicators.

In addition, there are few examples of benchmarking in construction, whose results are difficult to translate to other cases. However, the possible improvements in the processes and the reduction of costs and potential deadlines are so high that any effort to implement a benchmarking in construction companies is profitable in the long term.