The exchange of mediocrity on a poorly-defined topic. A lot of disillusionment with benchmarking stems from misconceptions about what it means to be a good performer. The truth is, there is no such thing as THE best practice organization. No company or plant is good at everything. Figure 2 illustrates this point for a carefully selected set of 31 metalforming plants, but the pattern holds for virtually every industry.
None outshines the others across the board.
Virtually all are near the top of the group on some measures, and near the bottom on others. Further, every firm looks mediocre on average. Even the firm with the best composite ranking scored no better than 15 th out of 31 on some performance measures, with an average rank of 10 th out of 31. First figure out the one or two measures you most want to target. Then zero in on the shops that are good at that.