Q&A - How can benchmarking help with managing quality?

Done properly, benchmarking can provide a useful quality improvement target for a business.

Benchmarking is a general approach to business improvement based on best practice in the industry, or in another similar industry.

Benchmarking enables a business to identify where it falls short of current best practice and determine what action is needed to either match or exceed best practice.

This can be a helpful approach for services as well as for products – for example a fast food business selling fish and chips could decide that it wanted to aim to equal McDonalds’ speed of meeting customer orders for takeaway food.

A financial services firm might want its call centre staff to answer 95% of telephone calls within six rings, if this is the practice of the best in the industry.

In some cases, firms can use internal benchmarking in which best practice may be set with reference to another department, or by a similar factory in a different location.