Benchmarking can be defined as a process for improving performance by constantly identifying, understanding and adapting best practices and processes followed inside and outside the company and implementing the results. The main emphasis of benchmarking is not on “best performance” but on improving a given business operation or a process by exploiting “best practices.”
“Benchmarking is the process of identifying, understanding and adapting outstanding practices and processes from organizations anywhere in the world to help your organization improve its performance.”
—American Productivity and Quality Centre
“Benchmarking is an on-going outreach activity; the goal of the outreach is identification of best operating practices that, when implemented, produce superior performance.”
—Bogan and English, Benchmarking for Best Practices
Benchmark refers to a measure of best practice performance. Benchmarking is the search for the best practices that yield the benchmark performance with a focus on how you can apply the process to achieve superior results.
Benchmarking is the systematic search for best practices, innovative ideas and highly effective operating procedures. It considers the experiences of others and uses it. It measures performance against that of the best-in-the-class organizations. It determines how the best-in-the-class achieve those performance levels, and uses the information as the basis for adaptive creativity and breakthrough performance
Source: Poornima M. Charantimath (2017), Total Quality Management, Pearson; 3rd edition.
Terrific post but I was wanting to know if you could write a litte more on this topic? I’d be very thankful if you could elaborate a little bit further. Many thanks!