Benchmarking: With encouragement from HSE, it is increasingly being applied in the world of health & safety.

Benchmarking is the process of identifying "best practice" in relation to both products (including) and the processes by which those products are created and delivered. The search for "best practice" can taker place both inside a particular industry, and also in other industries (for example - are there lessons to be learned from other industries?).

The objective of benchmarking is to understand and evaluate the current position of a business or organisation in relation to "best practice" and to identify areas and means of performance improvement.

Course Description
Benchmarking – improving ourselves by learning from others – although rather less than simple to implement and should not be considered a one-off exercise and to be effective, it must become an ongoing, integral part of an ongoing improvement process with the goal of keeping abreast of ever-improving best practice.

Application of benchmarking involves four key steps:

1. Understand in detail existing business processes
2. Analyse the business processes of others
3. Compare own business performance with that of others analysed
4. Implement the steps necessary to close the performance gap

Course Objective
Comparing your health and safety management systems, processes and performance with others in order to identify ways of:

• Reducing accidents and occupational ill-health
• Improving legal compliance
• Reducing compliance costs

          Benchmarking is the next best step in order to identify further opportunities for improvement.
Who Should attend?
This course is designed for anyone with responsibility for health and safety, including:

• Health and safety managers and advisers
• HR directors and managers
• Facilities, maintenance and engineering managers

          Maximise benefits of your systems, compliance and enhanced reputation (both internally and externally).

Course Outline

• Risk assessment information
• Internal and external injury and ill-health data
• Feedback from safety monitoring activities
• Sampling exercisesand documention
•  Establishing performance indicators
• Limitations of accident data as a sole measure of performance

Selecting partners

• Advantages and disadvantages of internal and external benchmarking
• Agreeing a benchmarking partnership
• Understanding and working with your partner’s operations
• Exchanging joint information requirements
• Agreeing performance indicators
• Corporate Health and Safety Performance Index (CHaSPI) (HSE)
• Agreeing individual responsibilities for the benchmarking partnership
• Procedures for site visits

Learning – and acting on lessons learned