About Benchmarking

Best Practices Benchmarking® is a powerful tool to gain competitive insight and provides “evidence-based” views of performance throughout product and organization lifecycles. In general, it is the application of what is learned in benchmarking that delivers the marked and impressive results so often noted. We supplement the traditional metrics-focused approach with an analysis of why and how practices produce exceptional results. Many industry leaders and companies use our benchmarking tool to identify the gaps in the process to improve and enhance performance.

View an excerpt of "Benchmarking for Best Practices: Winning Through Innovative Adaptation"

Types of Benchmarking

There are two primary types of benchmarking:

• Internal benchmarking: comparison of practices and performance between teams, individuals or groups within an organization
• External benchmarking: comparison of organizational performance to industry peers or across industries

These can be further distilled as follows:

• Process Benchmarking: Demonstrate how top performing companies accomplish the specific process in question. Such benchmarking is collected via research, surveys/interviews, and site visits. By identifying how others perform the same functional task or objective, people gain insight and ideas they may not otherwise achieve. Such information affirms and supports decision-making by executives.


• Performance Metrics: “Performance metrics” give numerical standard against which a client’s own processes can be compared. These metrics are usually determined via a detailed and carefully analyzed survey or interviews. Clients can then identify performance gaps, prioritize action items, and then conduct follow-on studies to determine methods of improvement.


• Strategic Benchmarking: Identify the fundamental lessons and winning strategies that have enabled high performing companies to be successful in their marketplaces. Strategic benchmarking examines how companies compete and is ideal for corporations with a long-term perspective.

Learn About Process, Performance and Strategic Benchmarking.

Importance of Benchmarking

Benchmarking is #1 most used global management tool, yet most companies fail to use benchmarking to their full advantage. We have developed more than 25 types of benchmarks below to help companies look forward and build winning strategies, tactics and plans

By closely working with the client, Best Practices, LLC can identify improvement opportunities and make recommendations to address each opportunity. Contact us to learn more about how benchmarking can help your business achieve best-in-class performance.

For more information on how we define best practices and our benchmarking research methodology,
- See more at: What is a best practice?

Learn More About the Applications & Benefits of Benchmarking.