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Benchmarking is the practice of learning from your peers, and using that learning for continuous improvement. While not created in the context of lean, it is a universally applied tool that is very consistent with lean thinking. It turns out, however, that most benchmarking has little positive impact on the organization doing it. It feels productive and looks like progress, but if benchmarking is only focused on finding best practices to copy, it is likely to lead you down the wrong path.
Copying solutions is ineffective for three reasons. First, you might have a different problem. Consider, for example, copying answers from the kid next to you in class, only to find out that he took a different test with different questions. second, the enabling culture and infrastructure that make a solution work in another plant are likely to be different from those in your plant, leading to unpredictable results. Third, and perhaps most important, you aren't earning the...