Measure up in 2026 with a focus on benchmarking

“How much do you bench?” has long been a common question in certain testosterone-filled circles, a quick way to size up the competition’s strength and validate the person asking.

This is not where the term “benchmark” came from, mind you. It dates back hundreds of years to how surveyors measured elevation. The term was popularized in the business world by Xerox, which wanted to copy—and surpass—the success of its Japanese rivals. Over there, continuous improvement was already ingrained into the culture, with kaizen practices and kanban boards that visualized progress, helping their auto manufacturers add efficiencies and reach new heights since the 1940s and ’50s.

Over time, benchmarking has become crucial to help fleets and shops grow in strength and maintain a competitive edge. According to Samantha Thompson, vice president of customer success and fleet telematics at Penske Truck Leasing, 80% of transportation professionals rely on some version of benchmarking.

And in that spirit, we’ve made this entire issue about the data and analytics tools to help your operation grow. We start with a guide to help sort out what data and KPIs contribute to that cause. Above all, the main lesson is ensuring the quest for improvement does not diminish safety.

Just under that, make sure the data translates to real-world improvement. Politicians may cherry-pick numbers to make themselves and their policies look better, but this industry doesn’t have that luxury. Every change-management initiative must be backed by evidence of what is and isn’t working.

“Any goals must be measurable and attainable in some way, otherwise you won’t see improvement,” efficiency expert Peter Cooper explained.

You can—and should—benchmark metrics such as technician efficiency, but not at the expense of doing the job the right way. For example, production lines at manufacturing facilities have used digital kanban screens for at least a decade to show real-time progress: green screens are good and red ones bad. But in a shop bay, where work rarely repeats the same way twice, that kind of pressure could encourage corner-cutting and inaccurate repairs. A slight bump to the bottom line is not worth the risk to your drivers.

That feature by Gregg Wartgow offers plenty of ways to safely measure and improve tech metrics, and we'll be releasing it online in January so you can start the year with measurable, data-driven goals. We also threw in some ways to help managers measure their own strengths and weaknesses, which could help as you set your 2026 resolutions.
For some high-level benchmarking, for both your business and the overall industry, turn to our annual data report, which compiles survey results from our audience and external research to provide a snapshot of both the equipment and shop trends shaping the industry.

We also must note that knowing where you stand among your peers from year to year could soon become antiquated. With the rapid adoption of AI, it won’t be long before every fleet can get all the benchmarking data they need minute to minute.

It already exists for Penske customers with the introduction of Catalyst AI, a benchmarking tool that combines the logistics and maintenance provider’s troves of fleet data with machine learning and data analytics. Thompson showed it to me at the American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition, cycling through a sample fleet’s fuel efficiency and unplanned repair metrics, and how those stack up to comparable fleets.

“Catalyst AI is a decision engine behind the scenes that allows us to aggregate information across the data in our ecosystem to do a couple of cool things,” Thompson explained. “First and foremost, [Catalyst AI] identifies a unique fleet, applies a similarity score to that fleet, and then finds all the other fleets that look like it, and then does a comparison about performance.”

You can instantly gauge how you should be doing based on the standard means, and even likely root causes for why you are or are not excelling. The dashboard also color codes with red or green and assigns a numerical value. Think of it as your fleet’s GPA.

A user can also filter down to hub and individual asset performance and use the “Fantasy Fleet” option to check their fleet against the theoretical gold standard.

The patent-pending algorithm sorts for around 30 different data points and amalgamates those into a benchmark fleet. Those competitors are anonymized, so their identity is safe. Thompson said guessing a specific fleet from the data would be “equivalent to winning the lottery 32 times in a row.”

But you win every time, because you can easily identify core strengths and areas that might need to be bulked up. While it only exists for Penske, it’s hard to imagine their competitors won’t Xerox this continuous improvement tool. It’s likely that in a few short years, benchmarking tools will be as important for fleet managers as scan tools are for techs, alerting leadership to faults in operations and suggesting troubleshooting methods.

But that’s the future. And the important thing is to survive the next year, a feat made easier by not hiding from underperforming metrics.

“What gets measured gets improved, right?” Thompson offered. “Data and facts are stubborn things. Once you put it front and center, you can’t unsee it.”

Her advice for 2026?

“Start where you have the most pain or the most opportunity to gain, focus in on that, set some small but achievable goals, and then start chipping away at it,” she concluded.