Benchmarking for agility

Agility and agile manufacturing are recent organizational development philosophies that industry and academia are studying. Benchmarking is a business practice that will aid in the study, refinement, and application of agility principles. This paper focuses on two issues, benchmarking agile environments and agile benchmarking requirements. Benchmarking process, tools and metrics issues are discussed within the perspective of agility requirements. The process, tools and metrics discussion allows for a simultaneous study of the two major issues in integrating benchmarking and agility. In this paper a need for a developmental evolution in benchmarking is also observed. A number of potential directions and enablers are defined based on current practice and emerging mechanisms for agility and benchmarking.