Title: An e-handbook for designing and implementing a benchmarking project

Authors: Alessandro Margherita, Mark Klein

Addresses: e-Business Management Section, Scuola Superiore ISUFI, University of Lecce, Via Monteroni s.n., 73100 Lecce, Italy. ' Center for Digital Business, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 3, Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, USA

Abstract: Growing competition forces companies to optimise their business processes while enhancing the value of products and services delivered to customers. The comparison with recognised standards or outstanding practices, also belonging to different industries, represents an important checkpoint in this proposal. This paper defines, based on existing approaches, a roadmap to successfully perform a benchmarking initiative. The MIT Process Handbook, an online repository of business knowledge coupled with an innovative process redesign methodology, is thus applied to suggest, through the use of illustrative examples, how purposefully created data, alternatives and tools can be used to implement each phase of the roadmap.

Keywords: process benchmarking; benchmarking; process performance; best practices; process metrics; process management; business processes.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPMB.2007.013315

International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking, 2007 Vol.2 No.1, pp.10 - 28

Published online: 20 Apr 2007 *

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