Manufacturing businesses are increasingly being encouraged to use benchmarking as a component of their quality systems, although many manufacturing and quality professionals view benchmarking as a narrow set of tools and techniques. Dr Tim Burden from the Birmingham Technology Innovation Centre (TIC), believes that diagnostic benchmarking should be at the heart of SMEs' development strategyTIC, which defines benchmarking as'a systematic approach to business improvement, where best practice is sought and implemented to improve a process beyond the benchmark performance', has used the diagnostic audit and benchmarking methodology to drive company improvement programmes to achieve radical improvements in new product development and manufacturing performance (see figure 1).
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