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Benchmarking Essay

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Benchmarking: A Quantitative and Qualitative Look at Southwest Airlines and British Airways In today 's competitive marketplace, all firms are seeking ways to improve their overall performance. One such method of improvement, recently adopted by many firms, is benchmarking. Benchmarking is a technique used to evaluate internal business processes. "In this analysis, managers determine the firm 's critical processes and outputs, baseline those processes, then compare the performance of each process against a standard outside the industry" (Bounds, Yorks, Adams, & Ranney 1994). To effectively improve a business process to world-class quality, managers must find a firm that is recognized as a global leader, not just the industry …show more content…

These processes are not performed in isolation. The end result relies heavily on the satisfactory completion of all processes and the communication of all functional areas involved. By viewing these processes as a whole, management can identify process inefficiencies. These inefficiencies may include delays or queuing at process bottlenecks, lack of control or checking, or places responsibility for process activities is not clear. The Total Quality Management model is limited in its scope of improvement. Total Quality Management establishes targets for performance rather than focusing on continuous improvement. This perspective is to narrow because it fails to consider the overall improvement process. To be effective, management must incorporate all aspects of the business into a dynamic improvement process. The fourth key to benchmarking is systematic external benchmarking. Once management has realized the importance of internal business processes and world-best practices, it is their responsibility to combine these two themes. Management must systematically examine its internal practices and performance in comparison to external benchmarks. The last key is benchmarking as a survival technique. It may effectively save a business from declaring bankruptcy. However, benchmarking should be used in organizations regardless of financial or economic status. Internal benchmarking is one of the most important aspects of benchmarking.

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