Electrical Safety and Disaster Management

Introduction

"Benchmarking is easily about making comparisons along with other organizations and then learning the lessons in which those comparisons throw up".

 "It is the continuous procedure of measuring products, practices and services against the toughest competitors or those companies recognized as industry leaders (best in class)".

There could be innumerable definitions of benchmarking but within broader sense benchmarking means: "One has to improve by learning procedure and this learning comes from others."  It means that essentially it includes sharing information for learning from other and adoption of best practices for improvement and to bring modifies in performance.

The benchmarking process by extensively includes comparisons of performance but one has to remain in mind that it is simply not a competitor analysis, only.  One has to be constantly vigilant, alert about the external environment and adopt the changes as per need to remain in competition because things are changing extremely fast in the present times.

We could say that benchmarking leads to superior performance by constant search and adoption for industry best practices.

Benchmarking is a very significant management tool irrespective of the nature of industry, management style or ownership. In private sector it is used to gain a competitive edge and in public sector it is used as a powerful tool for improving and delivering modern public services. In private sector the emphasis is to excel within competitive environment and be a front-runner so benchmarking is used as a tool to find innovation outside the industry paradigm crossing all the boundaries. In public sector, the widespread and systematic use of benchmarking helps within improving the performance and could assist individual and organizational learning. We can extremely well see that benchmarking is a tool to be adopted by everyone irrespective of nature of business, type of industry, management control, etc. It is being recognized as a valuable tool for external learning for everyone. In the subsequent subsections we will learn different aspects of benchmarking.