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Introduction
Changes are rapidly occurring in the economy. The modern economy is no longer based on mass production and consumption of goods and services. Since global competition is rising, with more and more national economies becoming liberalized, it is imperative that companies must have:
- quality beyond the competition;
- technology before the competition; and
- costs below the competition ([62] Watson, 1993).
In other words, many companies must strive to be better, faster, and cheaper than their competitors, for which, benchmarking should be recognized as a catalyst for improvement and innovation. Benchmarking has been a popular topic for the last two decades and its significance as a practical method in developing critical areas of business is indisputable. It can be said as a management tool for attaining or exceeding the performance goals by learning from best practices and understanding the processes by which they are achieved.
It is evident from a survey among Fortune 1000 companies, 65 percent of the organizations uses benchmarking as management tool to gain competitive advantage ([36] Korpela and Tuominen, 1996). Similarly a survey in France taken up by Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie estimates that 50 percent of the 1,000 companies use benchmarking regularly, and 80 percent of them regard it as an effective approach of change ([33] Maire et al. , 2005). [32] Jarrar and Zairi (2001) have conducted a survey of about 227 organizations from 32 different countries and concluded that it has been applied in most of the sectors like manufacturing, health services, insurance, financial services, construction, banking, government, etc. For example, quite recently, [30] Henderson-Smart et al. (2006) has used benchmarking for learning and teaching and have developed a method to perform benchmarking in the field of academics, while [28] Graham (2005) has reviewed the applications of benchmarking in airports and concluded that benchmarking techniques have become well established in recent years within the airport sector, but the fundamental difficulties associated with inter-airport comparisons (particularly from different countries) and problems of comparability arising largely from the diversity of inputs and outputs, still remain and yet to be resolved effectively. In India too, a survey was conducted by [48] NPC-IFC Group (1994), which showed that about 70 organizations were using benchmarking.
Benchmarking - definition
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