A prActicAl guide Benchmarking in european Higher education

3. HISTORY OF BENCHMARKING
3.1 The Concept of Benchmarking
Improving university performance became an undisputable issue in the
increasingly open and competitive environment in which even public higher
education institutions have to find their place in Europe today. But the need
was not automatically accompanied by an answer to the question of how to do
it. Benchmarking is a positive process towards the answer. We will return to
definitions later, but for the purposes of a working understanding of what we
mean by benchmarking at the outset: Benchmarking is an internal organisational
process which aims to improve the organisation’s performance by learning
about possible improvements of its primary and/or support processes by
looking at these processes in other, better-performing organisations.
Benchmarking has been widely used in industry, manufacturing, finance,
transport, logistics, retail and services. Benchmarking groups in the
corporate sector aim at discovering ways to reduce costs, optimise work
input, provide efficient flow of materials and information, improve logistics,
distribution and marketing and optimise payrolls.
In Europe, the use of benchmarking as a tool for improving performance both
in the private and public sectors has also been supported by the European
Commission (DG Enterprise) for more than ten years. The underlying aim is
to improve Europe’s competitiveness by working at three levels, i.e. improving
the general context in which organisations cooperate, improving the internal
environment and working with sectoral benchmarking approaches focusing
on the competitive challenges in specific sectors of industry. Several benchmarking
initiatives were started in the late 1990s such as a benchmarking
group on competitiveness, a European Benchmarking Forum and a High
level Group on Benchmarking. A Benchmarking Coordination Centre was
also established to provide support with data and resources.
16 A Practical Guide - Benchmarking in European Higher Education