BENCHMARKING
An important new tool in management involves the comparison of the new venture and its operations to outside or competing companies. This performance evaluation process was initiated in the United States by the Department of Energy. IT is the “methodology for measuring performance against that of best-in-class organizations, determining how the best-in-class achieve performance levels, and applying similar strategies for performance improvement… Put simply it is a quantitative comparison between organizations.” In some fashion it has the appearance of continuing on from the Peters and Waterman text In Search of Excellence where the authors studied successful corporations and extracted the strategies they used to win.
There are five steps in the benchmarking program: