Benchmarking of best practices: an overview of the academic literature

1. Introduction

The objective of this paper is to overview the academic literature on benchmarking of best practices, tracking the most important articles and understanding the similarity between studies.

Conceptually, “benchmarking” is defined by Camp (1989) as a process that allows an organization to increase its performance by comparing its products, services and processes with others that are recognized references (benchmarks).

This concept is closely related to the “best practice” concept, which refers to the “management practices and models that have been successful in exemplar firms” (Leseure et al., 2004), which can be traced back to the World Class Manufacturing work of Schonberger (1986).

In concept, the critical characteristics of the best practice benchmarking is that the benchmarking is related to the organizations’ processes, comparing them with processes of other organizations or sectors (competitors or not) in order to improve them (Francis and Holloway, 2007).

Although Camp and other authors have popularized the benchmarking concept through the case of Xerox Corporation, Watson (1993) defends that its history is based on practices of Japanese industries after the Second World War, when they utilized benchmarking efforts to improve the business process in search for the best practices. Dattakumar and Jagadeesh (2003) also noticed that there are attempts of using the benchmarking concept before the Xerox case in different situations as early as 1983.

In his studies, Watson has identified five generations of benchmarking practices that have emerged in history: reverse engineering, competitive benchmarking, process benchmarking, strategic benchmarking and global benchmarking.

The concept of benchmarking has maturated, and has been applied successfully to almost all industries (Dattakumar and Jagadeesh, 2003), evolving from the approach that focussed mainly on the measurement of performance to that which focusses on the management activities and practices that lead to superior performance (Voss et al., 1994). The literature on benchmarking also has been evolving, from initial “how” and “why” to gradually incorporating new analysis and critique (Francis and Holloway, 2007).

From time to time, a review of the literature of a certain field of knowledge becomes important to identify and organize its main theories, new trends, most relevant works, influent authors and important publications.

Some studies previously reviewed the literature on benchmarking, such as Yasin (2002), Dattakumar and Jagadeesh (2003), Francis...