Bruce Searles has been an Accredited Delivery Partner for Benchmarking with the Australian Quality Council (AQC) and is managing Partner / Director for Benchmarking Partnerships, who now own Australian Quality Council Benchmarking. He has delivered training and international presentations on benchmarking in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, USA, Nepal, Seoul, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Taipei. He leads the strategic relationship and benchmarking projects with the Asian Productivity Organisation, Singapore Productivity Association, FTPI in Thailand, Development Academy of the Philippines, NPC Malaysia, TPAF Fiji and the APQC in the USA. Bruce has qualifications including Bachelor of Engineering, Masters of Engineering Science and Certificate IV in Quality Management and Organisational Self Assessment (AQC). He is a Fellow of Engineers Australia. He was previously Executive for International Best Practice for Australia’s largest general insurance company (NRMA Limited).

Thesis / Abstract

Bruce will use case study examples to describe the quality management systems used in Australia and the Asia Pacific region and the impacts of these systems on business performance for both the private and public sectors. He will describe how leading organizations are moving away from generic quality management and adapting their own business excellence frameworks to suit their arket and customer needs and their own strategic purposes. The relevance of these innovations in the manufacturing sector will also be discussed including the benefits achieved.

Bruce will also then describe how organizations deploy the innovative quality management system to make it come to life and serve a real purpose. How organisations integrate the use of benchmarking to accelerate improvements in areas where they have gaps will be addressed. Bruce will describe how benchmarking is used as a business excellence tool to find, adapt and implement outstanding practices to accelerate improvements, focused initially on prioritizing strategic improvement needs.

The presentation will also address some of the myths and misconceptions about benchmarking. Bruce will discuss the basics of strategic benchmarking for accelerated improvements and that benchmarking is not benchmarks. FIBC participants will learn how to focus on what’s important and peel away layers to get to the heart of what to improve. They will also learn how to identify benchmarking partners in different industries, different types of benchmarking, how to get started and how to measure to avoid unknowingly comparing apples and oranges.

The presentation will also show case study examples of benefits achieved.

About Benchmarking Partnerships

Benchmarking Partnerships is a virtual organisation based in Australia with global reach. We partner people in different organizations and different industries so that through shared learning and partnership networking they can rapidly improve. We do this by facilitating think tanks, sharing of best practices and ideas leadership through networking and benchmarking to help organizations to accelerate improvement. Bruce Searles and Anton Benc are the founders and front line managing partners of all projects with all customers delivering a boutique customer outcome focused service.

Our networks include over 5,000 people across Australia, Asia, NZ and also extend into other continents internationally. These networks include partnerships with the (APO) / Asian Productivity Organization (we are designated benchmarking experts to support 20 Asian countries), NZ Business Excellence Foundation (NZBEF), BPIR.com Ltd (New Zealand), Singapore Productivity Association (SPA), Training and Productivity Authority of Fiji (TPAF) and the American Productivity and Quality Centre (APQC). The networks also include partnerships with high value topic experts for processes like Measurement, Innovation, Project Management, Strategy Deployment, Leadership, People Management, Customer and Marketing, Strategic Planning etc. We are a Member of the Global Benchmarking Network Community (GBN).

We commenced as sole Benchmarking delivery partners with the Australian Quality Council, a not-for-profit peak body, recognized by the Commonwealth of Australia to facilitate business excellence and productivity improvements amongst Australian public and private sector organisations.