Benchmarking Now and in the Future

Abstract

• Benchmarking is much more than performance comparisons.
• Benchmarking focuses on “learning from the experience of others” and is defined as “identifying, adapting, and implementing the practices that produce the best performance results”.
• Benchmarking is a powerful method for breakthrough thinking, innovation, improvement and for delivering exceptional bottom-line results.
• New benchmarking methodologies aim to ensure that benchmarking projects result in major benefits (financial and non-financial).
• New website tools make benchmarking easier.

Introduction

Organizations are constantly looking for new ways and methodologies to improve their performance and gain a competitive advantage. As they seek improvements to their own business processes, many organizations recognize the importance of learning from best practices that have been achieved by other organizations. By removing the need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ and providing the potential to adopt proven practices, benchmarking has become an important methodology for providing a fast-track to achieving business excellence.