Why Internal Benchmarking Beats External Benchmarking Every Time (And Why You Need Both)

Picture five maintenance crews at a single mine site. Same systems. Same leadership. Same budget. Now imagine a structured maturity assessment reveals a 40% performance gap in planning maturity between the best and worst team.

That kind of gap doesn't show up in monthly reports. It only surfaces when you apply a consistent framework across all teams using the same criteria and the same scoring method.

Here's the thing: most mining operations spend their energy chasing external benchmarks. "How do we compare to the industry?" is the question that comes up in every boardroom. It's a fair question. But it's not the most useful one to ask first.

The problem with starting external

External benchmarking sounds compelling. Compare your maintenance operation against industry peers, find out where you sit, and build a case for investment. In theory, it works. In practice, it runs into a wall almost immediately.

The wall is context.

When you benchmark against another operation, the first response from your team will be: "That's a different ore body." Or different equipment. Or different climate, workforce, contractor model, or regulatory environment. And they're not wrong. External comparisons always carry an asterisk, and that asterisk gives people an excuse to dismiss the findings.

This doesn't mean external benchmarking is useless. Far from it. But if you lead with it, you're spending your political capital defending the comparison rather than driving improvement.

Why internal benchmarking lands harder

Internal benchmarking removes the asterisk.

When you assess multiple maintenance teams within the same operation using a consistent maturity framework, nobody can claim the comparison is unfair. Same site. Same systems. Same supply chain. Same conditions.

What you're left with is a clear, objective picture of where practice diverges. And that's where the real value sits.

The most common gaps tend to show up in five areas:

1. ‍Planning and scheduling maturity. Some crews run disciplined weekly schedules with realistic resource loading. Others are essentially reactive, even when they have a planning process on paper. The difference between a crew at Level 2 and Level 3 on a five-point maturity scale can translate to a 25% gap in wrench time.
2. ‍Work order quality. Specifically, the completeness and consistency of failure data captured in the CMMS. One crew meticulously records failure modes and corrective actions. Another closes work orders with "fixed pump." That data quality gap cascades into every downstream decision, from spares forecasting to RCM analysis.
3. ‍PM compliance and effectiveness. Not just whether PMs get done, but whether they're the right PMs. It's remarkably common to find teams with 95%+ PM compliance where the actual PM tasks haven't been reviewed in years. Compliance without effectiveness is just organised waste.
4. ‍Contractor management. How well maintenance teams integrate contractors into their planning process varies wildly, even within the same site. Teams that treat contractors as an extension of their workforce, with shared KPIs and planning visibility, consistently outperform those that manage them at arm's length.
5. ‍Shutdown and outage execution. This is often where the gap shows most dramatically. A mature shutdown planning process can deliver the same scope in 20 to 30% less elapsed time compared to a team on the same site relying on tribal knowledge and heroic effort.

When you present these kinds of gaps to site leadership, the conversation shifts immediately from "do we have a problem?" to "why is Crew B performing so differently from Crew D, and what do we do about it?"

That's a much more productive conversation.

Where external benchmarking earns its place

Once you've established the internal picture, external benchmarking becomes powerful rather than defensive.

Internal benchmarking tells you where your teams vary. External benchmarking tells you where your entire operation sits relative to what good looks like. The combination is what builds a genuinely compelling case for investment.

A maturity assessment calibrated against frameworks like the GFMAM Maintenance Management Landscape provides an independent, recognised reference point. When your best crew sits at Level 3 out of 5 on a globally accepted scale, and your worst sits at Level 1.5, you have two clear stories to tell.

First, the quick wins. Bringing your lower-performing teams up to match your best team requires no new technology, no capital investment, and no organisational restructure. It's a capability transfer exercise. The proof it works is already on site, because your best crew is doing it today. This is where you get fast, visible improvement with minimal spend.

Second, the strategic case. Showing that even your best team has headroom against the external benchmark builds the case for broader investment in systems, training, or technology. And because you've already demonstrated internal improvement, you have credibility when you ask for budget.

How to structure the assessment

A maintenance management maturity assessment that supports both internal and external benchmarking needs a few things to be useful.

Consistent criteria across all teams. This sounds obvious, but it falls apart quickly if assessors aren't calibrated. Structured rubrics for each dimension with specific, observable evidence requirements at each maturity level remove ambiguity and eliminate subjective scoring.

Coverage across the full maintenance management scope. Not just planning and scheduling. A robust assessment covers work identification, planning, scheduling, execution, analysis, continuous improvement, materials management, contractor management, reliability engineering practices, and HSEQ integration. Partial assessments lead to partial pictures.

A recognised external framework. Aligning to the GFMAM Maintenance Management Landscape or a similar international framework gives you external credibility and makes the benchmarking meaningful beyond your own operation. It also means you can track progress over time against a fixed standard.

Facilitated self-assessment combined with evidence review. Pure self-assessment tends to be optimistic. Pure audit tends to be adversarial. The most effective approach blends facilitated team scoring with objective evidence verification, scoring what can be demonstrated, not what's intended.

The output that drives action

The deliverable from a well-structured benchmarking assessment isn't a 200-page report that nobody reads. It's a visual, comparative picture that makes the gaps and opportunities immediately obvious.

A maturity heatmap showing all teams across all dimensions on a single page is one of the most effective communication tools available. Site managers can see instantly where their strongest and weakest teams sit, which dimensions have the most variability, and where the biggest uplift opportunities lie.

Pair that with a prioritised improvement roadmap, not a wish list, but a sequenced plan with realistic timeframes, and you've given maintenance managers and site leadership something they can actually act on.

Start with what you can control

The honest answer is that most mining maintenance operations have more improvement potential sitting inside their own fence line than they realise. The gap between their best and worst crews is often larger than the gap between their best crew and industry best practice.

Internal benchmarking surfaces that gap. External benchmarking puts it in context. Together, they build a case that's hard to argue with and easy to act on.

If you're curious about where your maintenance teams actually sit, we run structured maturity assessments across all dimensions of maintenance management, calibrated against the GFMAM framework and tailored to mining operations. The process takes two to three weeks per site, and you walk away with a clear picture of where you are, where the gaps sit, and what to do about it.

Get in touch to scope an assessment for your operation.