Outsourcing Dilemma: The Search for Competitiveness, The

Benchmarking

In addition to all their other worries, the functional heads have to consider that the development of benchmarking techniques, in theory at least, now provide their chief executives with a good guide to the relative performance of each function.

In recent years, the concept of ’benchmarking’ has grown in importance without ever being as widely used as it could be. Benchmarking has become one of those concepts that can influence an organization even where it is not being practised internally. For example, the publication of a report a number of years back showing that it cost one American meat packing plant 25 cents to produce an invoice, quite naturally caused concern to directly competitive finance directors, some of whom had an ...