Benchmarking is a crucial aspect involved in quality management. Benchmarking has achieved widespread recognition and popularity across several organizations in the world and is presently considered as an effective method for promoting process enhancements and re-engineering in numerous processes and methodologies. Benchmarking is a famous strategy for identifying requirements and prerequisites and defining objectives. Benchmarking speeds up an organization's capacity to make upgrades. It is not simply about rolling out improvements and upgrades for the sake of rolling out improvements, benchmarking is tied in with adding value.
When an organization thinks about benchmarking, it should take a close look at all parts of its business, its products and services, and its procedures. Benchmarking won't work unless an organization knows itself. It has been defined by several different definitions based on perceptions, its utilization, implementation strategy and methodology. It is essentially learning from others.
It is defined as a procedure for enhancing processes of organization by persistently recognizing, understanding, and embracing exceptional practices and procedures in organization. Any person or organization that participates in open exchange of information for the purpose of learning from each other in areas of interest is known as Benchmarking Partner. The term 'benchmarking' was first coined and adopted by Xerox in 1979. Xerox's main objective was to evaluate and assess its procedures and processes, to recognize its strengths and shortcomings and adjust to continually changing market and economic situations.
Benchmarking enables you to find the shortfalls and gaps in your execution when contrasted and compared with another successful organization's processes. Benchmarking is utilized in an organization across several range of processes and methodologies.
There are four critical questions that every organization should ask itself for carrying out the Benchmarking process:
What should we benchmark?
Whom should we benchmark?
How do we perform the process?
How do they perform the process?
