Methods and tools for first five steps of benchmarking process

Summary form only as given. Many enterprises confront serious difficulties when they decide to undertake a continuous improvement of their performance. Among the approaches which may help an enterprise to improve its performance, benchmarking is required today as one of the most efficient and effective management tools. However, benchmarking seems often lacking a modeled and theoretical thinking which hinders the benefits and makes difficult the reuse of realized experiments. The aim of this paper is to formalize the benchmarking process and to propose the tools and methods accompanying the steps of that process. The authors actual work focuses on the first two phases of the benchmarking process: measurement and self-analysis (phase 1); and determination of subject and partners of a benchmarking study (phase 2). For this purpose, related to the first phase, a method of diagnosis which is based on organizational modeling is employed. This method is based essentially on the assessment of internal customer satisfaction. In the second phase, three different data analysis methods are utilized. These methods are lexical analysis, and principal components and common factor analysis which are two multivariate analysis methods. These two phases serve the purpose of an internal benchmarking (comparison between different domains of activities in the enterprise) and of an external benchmarking (comparison between different enterprises). Three enterprises are selected for the benchmarking application. Related data are collected and analyzed, and results are reported