Good Benchmarking Practices

In order to prepare for a project, I’ve been looking into benchmarking tips online recently. I found many interesting articles, some of what they suggested had been practiced by me in two jobs: 1) IT consultant for an Engineering company in San Jose, USA; 2) KPI researcher for an Engineering Consulting company in Shanghai; some of them are new and inspiring. I’m sharing to benefit more colleagues.

1. What I’ve done in the past and turned out to be beneficial:

• Run a pilot project initially, perhaps with another branch/site of your organization, so that you can iron out any wrinkles before you engage with an external partner.
• Use a questionnaire. Seek a balance of qualitative and quantitative information when designing it and remember to test it first internally. Only ask questions that you’re willing to answer yourself.
• Get the planning right, including research. Careful preparation at strategic and operational levels is vital before you move into implementation. As well as doing benchmarking right, it’s vital to benchmark the right things. This means making sure your project addresses one or more of your organisation’s broader business goals. Key outcomes will include increased customer satisfaction and cycle time, improved quality, reduced waste, higher productivity and higher cost savings.

2. What I failed to do:

• Pick the right benchmarking partners. You need to ensure they are as serious about benchmarking as you are and their process is comparable. It’s hard to let someone else fill a questionnaire when it’s not part of their job. So better invest time in gaining co-operation and help from them, otherwise it’s highly likely that you collect invalid data in the end.

3. What are inspiring, and I’ll do them in future:

• Make sure you have the right project team in place to deliver your benchmarking. They need to be highly motivated and open to change with good communication skills – most of all they have to be credible individuals. Spend time gaining buy-in from those internal customers who stand to benefit most from your benchmarking project.
• Integrate your benchmarking with your other business improvement efforts. Its purpose is to measure, compare and improve so make sure it ties in with your other change initiatives.

Source of reference: http://www.thecqi.org/Knowledge-Hub/Quality-express/archives/Quality-updates/benchmarking-tips/

Some Cool Single-Line Functions in Python

Recently did many exercises with Python. I have to say it’s really a beautiful language! Lots of cool stuff could be achieved with a single-line function.

Here are some examples. I will add more when I come across them. Please add comments if you think there’s even a better way!

1. Write a function that takes a list, and returns a dictionary with keys the elements of the list and as value the number of occurances of that element in the list:

def count_list(l): return { key: l.count(key) for key in l }

2. Reverse look-up: Write a function that takes a dictionary and a value, and returns the key associated with this value.

def reverse_map(dict, v): return {value: key for key, value in dict.items()}[v]

3. Print the numbers 1 to 100 that are divisible by 5 but not by 3:

Method 1:

x1=range(101)

print filter(lambda x1: x1 % 5 == 0 and x1 % 3 != 0, x1)

Method 2:

[i for i in range(101) if i%5==0 and i%3!=0]

4. Loop over elements and indexes of a list, print them in a given form:

myList=[1, 2, 4]

for index, elem in enumerate(myList): print ‘{0} ) {1}’.format(index, elem)

result:

0) 1

1) 2

2) 4

5. Nearest neighbor – Write a function that takes a value z and an array A and finds the element in A that is closest to z. The function should return the closest value, not index

def find_nearest(a, a0):

return a.flat[np.abs(a – a0).argmin()]

**More to come!