Benchmarking for Competitive Advantage

Benchmarking is an effective structural approach to quality engineering and management. It involves investigating industry's best practices, analyzing and evaluating one's own operation for opportunities and implementing an action plan that includes the structure of goals, objectives and operating targets. This guide shows managers, engineers and quality personnel what the benchmarking process is all about, how it can help them and how they can implement the process in their organization. It is organized logically in the order of a typical benchmarking study - planning, data collection and analysis, implementing improvements, strategic assessment and applying the process in an organization. It includes successful benchmarking examples from a wide range of industries and companies, including AT&T, ALCOA and XEROX, and highlights the pitfalls of benchmarking to guard against, from poor planning to unscrupulous consultants. It also provides practical guidelines on teams, business systems, competition versus co-operation and databases, which should help organizations of all kinds to improve quality and productivity.