Getting to the facts – company benchmarking: issues in data collection and consistency

Since 1996 we have been members of a team which has enabled about 750 organisations covering both the manufacturing and service sectors from North East England to benchmark themselves against World Class standards. This project represented co-operation between academic institutions and business support agencies from the region. Its context was as part of a broader, publicly funded regional development project which aimed to enhance the effectiveness of the external support offered to the region's corporate population. For participating organisations, an assessment was made regarding both their practices and performances. A semi-random approach was taken to identifying a representative sample of organisations. It is not our intention in writing this paper to present the results of the two benchmarking surveys, but to consider various aspects of the questionnaire design and the process of data collection paying particular attention to the issue of data consistency between participating organisations.