Benchmarking
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (April 2007)
This article is about the business term. For the geolocating activity, see Benchmarking (geolocating). For other uses of the term, see Benchmark.
Benchmarking is the process of comparing the business processes and performance metrics including cost, cycle time, productivity, or quality to another that is widely considered to be an industry standard benchmark or best practice. Essentially, benchmarking provides a snapshot of the performance of your business and helps you understand where you are in relation to a particular standard. The result is often a business case and "Burning Platform" for making changes in order to make improvements. The term benchmarking was first used by cobblers to measure ones feet for shoes. They would place the foot on a "bench" and mark to make the pattern for the shoes. Benchmarking is most used to measure performance using a specific indicator (cost per unit of measure, productivity per unit of measure, cycle time of x per unit of measure or defects per unit of measure) resulting in a metric of performance that is then compared to others.
Also referred to as "best practice benchmarking" or "process benchmarking", it is a process used in management and particularly strategic management, in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to [[best practice companies' processes, usually within a peer group defined for the purposes of comparison. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Benchmarking may be a one-off event, but is often treated as a continuous process in which organizations continually seek to improve their practices.
Contents
References: ^ Beating the competition: a practical guide to Benchmarking. Washington, DC: Kaiser Associates. 1988. pp. 176. ISBN 978-1563650185. ^ Camp, R. (1989). The search for industry best practices that lead 2 superior performance. Productivity Press.