Title: Driving improvement opportunities in the food processing industry through benchmarking

Authors: Rakesh Jain, Om Prakash Yadav

Addresses: Faculty of Business and Law, John Foster Building, 98 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool L3 5UZ, UK. ' Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, 1410 14th Avenue N, 202 CIE Building, North Dakota State University, Fargo ND 58105, USA

Abstract: Increasing competition, ever-changing customer needs, and rapid technological advances exert a tremendous amount of pressure on the food processing companies to stay competitive. These companies also have to deal with a growing variety of products, short delivery times, high service level, increased focus on quality, and competitive cost. To compete in the global world, these companies need to learn continuously and use appropriate business improvement tools such as benchmarking, to improve their operation. This paper discusses how benchmarking can be an effective means for the food processing industry to help identify improvement opportunities and implement change process to improve business effectiveness. A benchmarking study of two food-processing companies has been carried out to identify a number of improvement opportunities for both the companies.

Keywords: benchmarking; food processing industry; continuous improvement; change process; process management; change management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPMB.2006.011333

International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking, 2006 Vol.1 No.4, pp.352 - 369

Published online: 18 Nov 2006 *

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