We live in a world of innovation. Most of the companies today aim at creating new and improved products and services, of which they are sole providers. In this era, competitor information is highly sought for and in the midst of the battle to get ahead of the competition, benchmarking seems to be evolving as the latest management fashion.

The word ‘benchmark’ originally refers to a reference point to compare measures against. There are several theories about where the word ‘benchmark’ came from. In previous times benchmark may have been used in fishing contests where the length of a fish is marked on a wooden bench or it may have originated through a cobbler’s effort to measure size according to a predefined one (Andersen & Pettersen, 1996). In an organisational setting, benchmarking originated with Xerox Business Systems in the late 1970s. But at that time benchmarking was used to make the organisation aware that their performance was not up to the mark as compared to others in the industry. Also, it set an example for Xerox showing them that someone had already made the improvements. Today, organisation performance benchmarking can perhaps best be defined as the practice of being humble enough to admit that someone else is better at something and being wise enough to learn how to match or even surpass them at it (APQC, 1993).

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