VMS Benchmark

Correspondingly, the VMS benchmark offers a measurable design with a large number of advantages:

• VMS' comparison process uses weighted comparable quantities / reference sizes, thereby guaranteeing that, from a relative point of view, very good, comparable data sets are taken into account more frequently and that relatively less account is taken of data sets that are less good. This breaks up the rigid peer groups.
• The breaking-up of the rigid peer groups makes it possible to "get a look over the fence". Approaches that have been successfully implemented in other sectors can, if necessary, be transposed.
• Criteria used to form peer groups play a more or less important role for different types of problems. This is taken fully into account through the introduction of flexible weights.
• The scaling process ensures that only comparable quantities / reference sizes are compared with each other. The one-dimensional and linear dependence of costs, which is implied by simple indicators of traditional benchmarking approaches, is replaced by a markedly more realistic model. This model takes account of bases, non-linearities and dependencies of several parameters.

Each innovative process brings not only new strengths but also new problems. The critical side effect / concomitant of the VMS benchmark is that the process cannot be displayed on a simple spreadsheet.

There are several reasons for this:

• The quantity of measured data requires the capacity of a database. We're talking here about millions of items of basic data.
• The mathematical processes require functionality and computing capacity that are not available in conventional spreadsheets.
• A dynamic modeling can almost never be implemented in a spreadsheet.
• This means that the high-level complexity of the process requires the corresponding tools – i.e., software – and the corresponding know-how.

However, VMS has transformed the increased technical effort into an advantage. While in conventional peer group benchmarks analysts typically took days to complete their work, VMS reduced the effort for calculating a DNA-level benchmark down to a few hours using suitable software – fully automated and without human intervention.

VMS clients use this in critical project situations for spontaneous detail analyses.