E Benchmarking of Business Chambers

The benchmarking team visited selected provincial business chambers in four Vietnamese provinces and interviewed some of their member entrepreneurs with structured questionnaires that reflected the developed benchmark criteria. Moreover informal discussions were conducted with other institutions for external view collection.

The business chambers’ performance was assessed using the instrument of benchmarking them against Vietnamese top performers. These top performers were selected during the process of data collection with the target to illustrate desirable future performance for provincial business associations.

The following figure 1 shows one example of the benchmarking exercise: business chambers in An Giang, Vietnam. There are considerable differences between the chambers concerning governmental influence, number of members, membership fee system, coverage, finance and quality of staff in the An Giang province of Vietnam. All institutions show a relatively weak performance in the service area.

Figure 1: business associations audit and benchmark in An Giang, one Vietnamese province

Figure 2 illustrates the average performance of all benchmarked organisations which is strong regarding the engagement of the board of directors and the established contacts with state agencies. The weaknesses are in mostly all cases the lack of staff, office and equipment, the financial capacity and the relatively low number of members.

Figure 2: average performance of Vietnamese provincial business associations

The performance differences between the business chambers are illustrated in figure 3 where the best and the worst organisation of the exercise are introduced. While one business chamber provides a full set of chamber products to its members, another one hardly offers any benefits:

Figure 3: differences in performance

Good and best practices as part of the benchmarking

During the interviews good and best practices of provincial business chambers were collected and presented to all benchmark exercise participants. Especially best practice examples were gathered to put the benchmarking exercise into the Vietnamese context and to enable less successful business chambers to learn from better performers.

Dissemination of results and feedback from participants

The character of benchmarking is competitive. Not only provincial but also national business chambers, state agencies and donors were attracted by the business chamber benchmark although the topic is generally considered as “unsexy”.

During two very well visited workshops the benchmark results plus good and bad practices and recommendations for improvements were disseminated on national and provincial level. The feedback from the participants indicates that the instrument can work successfully in the Vietnamese context.

Many business chambers have already started to improve their performance in key areas e g by attracting new members, contracting staff and collecting the membership dues.
The presentation of best practice was highly appreciated by the participants and there was general agreement that stronger business chambers can support the weaker ones in their development.

The benchmarking is regarded as extremely helpful and as a useful tool to facilitate a learning process within business chambers and for the whole chamber system.

Lessons learnt

Chamber benchmarking should be done in a “quick and dirty” manner.
The interviews and assessment should be carried out by the same persons. This increases chances that the performance of all participating business chambers is judged the same way.
In case this is not possible due to the large number of chambers it is an option to train an assessment team in order to assure that all team members score equally.

This article is based on a survey prepared for GTZ Vietnam: “Business Associations in Hung Yen, Quang Nam, Dak Lak, An Giang: Audit, benchmark and recommendations” (Lehmann Simone, Tang Van Khanh, Hanoi 2008)