Benchmarking for Best Practice

4    Benchmarking quality systems:the role of auditing

Auditors are like St Thomas; they require to see before they believe.

Bruce Marshall (1960)

There are only two qualities in the World: efficiency and inefficiency, and only two sorts of people, the efficient and the inefficient.

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

4.1  Introduction

The challenge for many organizations is to try to maintain high standards of quality improvement and ensure that the ethos and drive for continuously seeking better ways of managing processes can be maintained. In this respect, while having systems in place such as ISO 9000 is the best means for ensuring discipline and congruence and can establish high levels of synergy for creating value to benefit the end customer, ...