Enhancing the effectiveness of benchmarking in manufacturing organizations

Benchmarking is an important tool to emulate existing best practices in the industry at large and for achieving continuous improvements in business operations. Numerous examples of successful benchmarking are available in the professional literature and corporations have successfully used it to attain world class manufacturing/service stature. This paper, in particular, studies the differences and the similarities in the various prevalent benchmarking approaches followed by some successful corporations. An important objective of this study is to identify factors which enhance the effectiveness of benchmarking.