Benchmarking is essentially a business excellence tool for finding, adapting, and implementing leading practices to achieve superior performance. It is a powerful performance management tool that can be used to generate both incremental change and wide-ranging strategic reform. Benchmarking is a learning process in which information, knowledge, and experience about leading practices are shared through partnerships between organizations. It allows an organization to compare itself with others and, in the process, step back from itself and reflect. Comparative measurement through benchmarks helps to identify problems and opportunities and also tests hypotheses and gut feelings about performance. Benchmarking offers an organization an opportunity to change and to improve.

Once desired benchmark levels are identified and the organization applies learning from partners to adapt and improve the targeted processes, it is important to understand that in time benchmark levels will rise and there will be a need to monitor process outcome performance to determine potential opportunities to improve as compared with partners with better performance.

Benchmarking will tell you how well you are performing, how good you need to be (it will give a practical vision), how to get there (a road map), and therefore help you to achieve your mission, vision, and goals. Benchmarking is not a cookbook process looking only at ingredients or numbers.
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See also: Best Practices