Warehouse benchmarking
A way to measure non-financial performance of warehouses is benchmarking, which identifies warehouse inefficiencies of the critical resources such as labor, space, storage and handling equipment. Benchmarking is defined as ‘’[…] continuous measurement and improvement of an organization’s performance against the best in the industry to obtain information about new 38 working methods or practices (Kozak, p.1).’’ Benchmarking does not mean to adopt the methods of the benchmarked (the organization being benchmarked), but rather to compare the performance, to look at the way the other companies are more efficient, to learn valuable lessons, improve quality and customer satisfaction and by this, to gain superior performance
Before introducing benchmarking, the organization should conduct a research to identify which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Key Performance Measurement (KPMs) to apply. This will lead to the identification of performance gaps between the companies as well as to the identification of the enablers of better performance of the leading companies. The results should be applied for the sake of adaptation and improvement