The Economics of Benchmarking

For businesses seeking to gain the edge over their competitors, benchmarking is an increasingly popular tool used to compare operations and performance. ten Raa elegantly presents the techniques and theory to explain how performance indices and rankings are developed and how they can be used to improve efficiency, productivity and profitability. Benchmarking is a process designed to enhance firm or business unit perfomance by evaluating products, processes or functions against industry best practice. But many managers remain sceptical. Does benchmarking really deliver reliable measures of relative performance? In this compact and self-contained book, Thijs ten Raa demonstrates the power of benchmarking. He presents the tools, theory, and practice of benchmarking, explaining the principles that underlie the most commonly used technique, and shows how useful economic information about efficiency, productivity and profitability can be gleaned from it. Benchmarking has always been plagued by the problem of assigning weights to different performance scores, but ten Raa solves that problem, providing rational performance indices and rankings. The book features Excel screenshots to guide the readeer through applications, and real-world case studies are included throughout. For businesses seeking to gain the edge over their competitors, benchmarking is an increasingly popular tool used to compare operations and performance. ten Raa elegantly presents the techniques and theory to explain how performance indices and rankings are developed and how they can be used to improve efficiency, productivity and profitability.