Strategic Benchmarking Reloaded with Six Sigma: Improving Your Company's Performance Using Global Best Practice
Strategic benchmarking is a proven and effective methodology for improving overall business performance by examining the long-term strategies and approaches that enable high-performing companies to succeed. It helps companies identify best practices in relation to product development and delivery, core competencies, customer service, change preparedness, and more. It's a reliable and accurate way to gauge the market position and success of any business.In 1993, Gregory Watson introduced this revolutionary business performance methodology to managers and executives in Strategic Benchmarking. Now, this new edition updates Watson's classic text for the twenty-first century. This edition includes everything from the first edition, along with additional material that brings it fully into line with current thinking and practice. Most important, it includes entirely new chapters on supplementing strategic benchmarking with statistical concepts from Six Sigma. It features new information and resources, fresh case studies, and a new discussion of strategic planning and benchmarking.Six Sigma is changing and influencing American companies from coast to coast. Six Sigma significantly improves benchmarking in important ways: it provides an objective analysis standard for measuring cross-company performance; it delivers a scientific method to benchmarking through the use of a disciplined analytical approach; its mapping feature breaks down processes into single steps for individual analysis; and it helps optimize the performance and demonstrates the effectiveness of a proposed process change.With the addition of Six Sigma, this new edition helps managers undertake a serious assessment of their business assumptions, technological aptitudes, operational capabilities, and organizational competencies. This allows a true examination of corporate strategy, as well as a clear picture of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes of the workers who drive increased performance. Applying the scientific method to strategic benchmarking makes business planning a precise and measurable activity—and leads to real results. Strategic Benchmarking Reloaded with Six Sigma gives managers and business leaders a comprehensive, effective guide to better quality and higher performance.