What to benchmark? : A systematic approach and cases

This paper presents an approach for systematically defining the object of study of benchmarking based on deriving improvement actions from customer expectations and strategic decisions through business processes, and prioritising improvement actions that will most contribute to strategic objectives. It is based on management concepts such as business process mapping, performance measurement and other tools. After some introductory theoretical background and discussion of the proposal, a set of steps to guide the implementation of such an approach is presented and detailed. Finally, two cases of application are presented to illustrate the validity as well as to make some considerations based on the potential benefits and limitations of this proposal.