What information is needed for improvement?
■ It is unlikely that for any operation a single measure of performance will adequately reflect the
whole of a performance objective. Usually operations have to collect a whole bundle of partial
measures of performance.
■ Each partial measure then has to be compared against some performance standard. There are
four types of performance standard commonly used:
– historical standards, which compare performance now against performance sometime in
the past;
– target performance standards, which compare current performance against some desired
level of performance;
– competitor performance standards, which compare current performance against competitors’
performance;
– absolute performance standards, which compare current performance against its theoretically
perfect state.
■ The process of benchmarking is often used as a means of obtaining competitor performance
standards.
➤