9313346 Barr Benchmarking is the global search for industry's best practices, for use in improving an organization's products and processes. Benchmarking is a process whose use as a part of total quality management programs is becoming widespread, but suffers from a lack of identification of best practice companies from within a group and metrics for evaluating both the degree of leadership by these companies and degree of inefficiency of aspiring firms Because of the strong economic and mathematical underpinnings of the proposed approach, a framework for process improvement will be developed which provides proscriptive directions to aspiring companies for becoming benchmarks themselves. Development of the optimization based support software (productivity tools) is a key component of this project. These procedures and software will be validated on a particularly demanding service sector application.
