Benchmarks - what areas of the business do they cover?
 - Benchmarks cover all operating areas of a business. Generally 40 to 50 benchmarks would be
generated in a manufacturing sector

Performance - how is it measured?
- The first step is to identify the operations to be measured. Measurements are based on
accounting information and on hard data like manufacturing area. All information must be
normalized to insure that measurements across firms are consistant.

Benchmarks - how are they calculated?
- In each sector study, Benchmarks are establishes at a level where 25% of the participants are
already meeting or exceeding them and 75% are operating at levels that are below them.
Benchmarks thus represent a performance level that is at the bottom of the first quartile of
firms in any industry sector. Meeting all of the benchmarks would insure global
competitiveness.

Testing your competitiveness - using this tool.
- As a demonstration of the use of benchmarking, this tool covers three industry sectors and
seven benchmarks. The sectors are Residential Furniture Manufacturing, Book Publishing and
Aerospace Parts Machining. Firms in any of these sectors can enter their own data and
compare their performance to the sector benchmarks. Firms in other sectors can use the tool
but of course the benchmarks will not apply.

Technical requirements:
You 're browser must support javascript, and it must be enabled in order to use this tool. If you are not able to use this tool you may download a plain text version of the comparisons for your sector, listed below.