Introduction
Management concepts and exercise have since created a connection between effective functioning processes and operational administration. The efficiency of any given execution extent relies on how it will be employed. Therefore, for performance procedures to have a purpose and present beneficial information, it is vital to contrast. The appraisals may assess development in realizing specific objectives, evaluate movements in performance, and balance one company’s productivity compared to another (Narkunienė & Ulbinaitė, 2018).
Performance measurement is essential for companies to determine their market share, consumer wants, and needs, understand their strengths, and build on their employee-client relationship. This paper intends to compare Square Inc. to Visa, which are financial services companies that operate locally and internationally. It further wants to assess Square Inc.’s customer company’s strategic goals, establish an understanding of user’s actions, and evaluate business management exercises’ difficulties.
Approaches Employed in Benchmarking
Comparing Square to Visa Inc., the latter’s management performance processes as an administration tool should be vast to include input and process measures. For instance, the directors can utilize a scorecard which that presents several actions of assessment. The well-adjusted scorecard is one such strategy that will allow Square Corporation’s benchmark team to evaluate Visa Inc., its initiatives from four distinct perceptions: staff, development, consumer, and business (Dolfen et al., 2019).
The scorecard establishes a holistic model of strategy that enables all the company’s employees to understand how they contribute to the organization’s success and focus on change efforts. Therefore, once the right goals and methods are identified, the firm’s effective execution will be commenced by the managers (Dolfen et al., 2019). The successful implementation of the processes and objectives will, thus, help Visa Inc. to compete efficiently within its industry despite the current shift in consumer preference and competition from top financial services companies.
The objective and process for construction and project management establish a favorable environment for the effective use of benchmarking for assessing and enhancing productivity within Square Corporation. The role of benchmarking is similar to the Six Sigma model improvement strategy. Benchmarking is a vital part of a continuous development cycle. Measuring, equating to competition, and recognizing openings for progress is the principle of benchmarking (Narkunienė & Ulbinaitė, 2018). It comprises five integrated steps: defining, measurement, analysis, improvement, and control. The Square Corporation’s management should understand these vital steps before setting up a benchmarking team. The move will enable them to conduct a successful benchmarking process, thus improving its strategies to align Visa’s effective operations.
Application of Benchmarking
Process Benchmarking
Process benchmarking requires an in-depth interpretation of the business’s practices, equating productivity against core and outward benchmarks, and identifying methods to optimize and improve its practices.
The method’s goal is to enable the benchmarking company to understand how top organizations complete a procedure. Square Inc. can employ the process benchmarking approach by conducting an internal assessment of its procedures to make them more effective, fast, efficient and beneficial for its end consumer (Haghirian, 2018). Hence, the company can establish new strategies that will enable it to introduce such payment products as debit and credit cards, thus helping its consumers to choose between their cards or smartphones. The move will present the mixed product concept, thus gaining new markets, especially of consumers who prefer card payments over mobile device payments methods.
Strategic Benchmarking
The process entails comparing models, corporate policies, and theories to reinforce its strategic development and decide its tactical priorities. Its objective is to identify the plans that support prosperous organizations and business enterprises and contrast them to their models to identify ways to be competitive (Narkunienė & Ulbinaitė, 2018). The Square Inc.’s benchmarking team should assess the business models employed by Visa Corporation.
Since Visa Firm operates the multi-sided platform business model pattern, which induces the “cross-side” network impact, Square Inc. (Haghirian, 2018). They should assess the benefits and disadvantages of the theory. Consequently, the evaluation will enable the company to understand further how it can align its processes to the strategy, thus boosting its market share, productivity, and consumer experience.
Performance Benchmarking
The approach involves gathering data on how a company performs regarding revenue and consumer satisfaction and comparing the information externally. It further entails practices, such as benchmarking the operations of the Human Resource (HR) faction and a top company’s marketing team (Narkunienė & Ulbinaitė, 2018). Consequently, Square Inc. can benchmark the Visa Corporation’s HR operations using such metrics as staff net promoter score and management surveys. Similarly, it can benchmark Visa’s marketing strategies through the use of measuring net promoter score. The benchmarking can improve the organization’s HR and marketing operations by adjusting them to Visa Inc., thus boosting the overall performance of the financial service industry.
Recommendations
The objective of benchmarking is to identify performance gaps and expose openings to develop, production procedures further effective, minimizing cost, and boosting returns, improving consumer satisfaction. Square Inc. offers financial services that enable payment for products and goods through processing bank card payments through smartphones. However, the company does not provide physical bank card payments, which is a gap that has been tapped into by Visa (Dolfen et al., 2019). The gap has resulted in significantly low incomes than its competitor, which has invested substantially in both smartphone and physical credit card payments.
Presentation of card and online service payment to consumers has enabled Visa and MasterCard to expand their customer base and thus to stay competitive in the financial service industry. Therefore, Square’s stakeholders can invest in improving its operations by introducing credit and debit card services to its consumers. The move will enable the company to boost its market share among the clients who prefer card payments over card-less mobile device payments.
Performance targets are vital management tools that can help a company deliver strategic changes that a growing business requires. They help in determining the progress path of a company within a new market, thus firms like Square can utilize it to enable them to expand their operations globally and increase productivity. For instance, Square Inc. is seeking to expand its operations in regards to its service design capabilities (Haghirian, 2018).
The company stakeholders should aim at an annual increase in the number of patents it secures, of new services it launches. The move will present the company with a fair environment for gradual enhancement, thus reducing the cost of its operations. At the same time, it concentrates on fully implementing its strategies necessary to realize new product invention.
Finally, finding and retaining consumers has posed a significant challenge to several local and international companies. Several companies are currently facing challenges related to employee exit. The issue has been caused by lack of staff development, compensation packages, and poor working environment experienced in some corporations and Square Inc. is not an exception. Square Inc.’s benchmarking team should first start by assessing and measuring the information, it has about its current and target clients. For instance, the team can compare Visa sales data to their data to determine the financial services consumers choose over the other (Haghirian, 2018). Consequently, Square Inc. will identify the customer preferences, thus investing in the gaps within their operations. Hence, benchmarking is fundamental for the company to realize increased productivity and market share within the already competitive industry.
Conclusion
The benchmarking process plays a vital role in the growth of a business because it enables its administrators and stakeholders to identify new strategies and operations that drive its progress. Conversely, benchmarking is not a magical technique for enhancing productivity since it does not present complete solutions to its failures. Managers in Square Inc. should therefore set strategic objectives, recognize vital commerce queries, and invent KPIs that will enable them respond to the questions and track the company’s performance against its organizational goals. Therefore, benchmarking is a critical topic in the commerce industry and should be examined further by business experts to fully determine how its merits and demerits influence an organization’s productivity and success.
References
Dolfen, P., Einav, L., Klenow, P. J., Klopack, B., Levin, J. D., Levin, L., & Best, W. (2019). Assessing the gains from e-commerce. National Bureau of Economic Research. Web.
Parissa, H. (2018). Square enix. In Business development, merger and crisis management of international firms in Japan: Featuring case studies from fortune 500 companies, 55. (pp. 55-70). World Scientific.
Narkunienė, J., & Ulbinaitė, A. (2018). Comparative analysis of company performance evaluation methods. Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues, 6(1), 125–138. Web.