A packaging manager was over heard telling a friend that his boss had asked him to benchmark his inserting operation.

He proceeded to explain that his boss wanted all the department heads to create a record on how their operations were performing. The information would be used as a base point to see how they were doing over the year.

The packaging manager could not see how this would benefit the operation. After all, he was doing the best job he could. This assignment would just be more work.

Is the information being requested a baseline or a benchmark? Does a benchmark reflect the current output level or is it a level to work towards?

Some confusion comes from the traditional use of the term, which was a hard or permanent mark a surveyor would make. In this sense, it is easy to understand that we could use the word benchmark to indicate the current level or a starting point.

The term benchmark is now used as any point, which is used for evaluating current data.

A baseline, which may known by most people in terms of sports, is another term for creating a point from which to measure. How many sports use the term baseline? This would be a good trivia question.

The term has a broad usage and implies measuring or comparing action to the line. A baseline for heart measurement is one example. It could be the minimum tolerance of a process against which items are measured.

A baseline could be a measurement that determines acceptable or unacceptable. It could be the point from which measurements or data is compared to, such as the baseline of hours per function.

So, if the manager determined their inserting rate, would it be a baseline or a benchmark?

The quality folks would suggest it is a baseline, not a benchmark.

In quality circles, benchmarking tends to refer to external goals. Xerox used this term and popularized it when it looked at all copiers on the market and determined which ones were the best. They defined this in quantitative terms and used it as a goal for their copiers to exceed… an aspiration.

People that write about cars use the term 'benchmark for quality,' 'benchmark for road handling,' etc. "The benchmark to which others strive," is almost a cliche.

An entire company could be benchmarked. For example, Florida Light and Power looked at all utilities that they thought were doing the best and used those operations as benchmarks for their improvement. It must have worked, as I do not hear them referred to any more as "Florida light and flicker."

Whereas baseline denotes a bottom or starting point, common usage of the term benchmark denotes an upper point to reach. This means you can have both a baseline and a benchmark. Not only can there be both, there should be both.

What should the manager measure to create a baseline? Baselines are best when they are absolute numbers and not averages. This requires comparable elements in the measurements. For example, lumping the inserter throughput of a 1 into 1 with inserting 12 into 1 has limited, if any, value.

It could be argued that no two inserting runs are equal, even if the number of inserts are the same. Some of this is true, which is why using averages are to be avoided. To accommodate the differences in the inserts is why our I-PIP© (Inserting Productivity Improvement Process©) system assigns different values to the unique attributes of an insert.

Basic measurement inserts as packages per hours (total inserted packages divided by number of hours the inserter was in operation), insert package per shift, and copies per inserting hour (total inserts inserted divided by inserter staff hours) are some of the more commonly maintained records.

Most of the measurements are not very extensive. Among the reasons is that the calculations might be done by hand, the data could be determined by a spreadsheet, but that gets pretty huge over a short period of time and the most important reason: no one uses it.

Of course, there are some operations that do a superb job of gathering data and using it. This is the expectation rather than the rule.

If an operation is charted by comparing the results of this week to past history or against a baseline, there is not much incentive for improvement. They make pretty charts, but maybe little else.

However, if the operation is charted against a benchmark of the best in the industry this can be a strong incentive to improve. Here, we see that a benchmark can be defined as the bottom output of the best.

As Dr. Deming told us, charting an operation does not improve an operation any more than posting a sign urging employees to improve quality increases the products quality.

One VP of Production we work with believes that there is value for his supervisors to gather the information and create charts. He feels it makes them focus, and focus sometimes solves problems. It is also the first step to understanding the process and to make improvement.

The boss was right, there has to be measurements of the operation against which to judge progress. Add an industry benchmark and some basic process improvement tools and there is good reason to expect improvement.