TQM Benchmarking to help guide and drive internal performance has long been a passion of mine. I worked for Office Depot in the United States for quite a few years early in my career and I had the opportunity to support competitive intelligence efforts that ended up with our development of new benchmark performance metrics. Your thoughts around benchmarking in the service industry starting with internally establishing the best performing units as the standard that all other business units should aspire to is compelling (Hong et al., 2012). I also see value in looking externally as well as you are essentially limiting yourself by only looking at business unit performance internally. It is easier to establish but you are not doing anything to establish improved performance benchmarks for your best performing business units in this approach although the other business units have more challenging performance goals. It is also important to note that the benchmarking approach shou ld align to the company's overall quality strategy so the improvement results support the business goals and objectives (Van Schalkwyk, 1998).

QUESTION: How do you think this approach would change if your business were already the market leader?

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