the process of identifying, sharing, and using knowledge and best practices. It focuses on how to improve any given business process by exploiting top-notch approaches rather than merely measuring the best performance. Finding, studying and implementing best practices provides the greatest opportunity for gaining a strategic, operational, and financial advantage. Informally, benchmarking could be defined as the practice of being humble enough to admit that someone else is better at something and wise enough to try to learn how to match, and even surpass, them at it. Benchmarking is commonly misperceived as simply number crunching, site briefings and industrial tourism, copying, spying, or espionage. In no way quick and easy, benchmarking is actually an ongoing process., benchmark - a point of reference; a criterion, touchstone