"Benchmarking is a tool to help you improve your business processes. Any business process can be benchmarked."
"Benchmarking is the process of identifying, understanding, and adapting outstanding practices from organizations anywhere in the world to help your organization improve its performance." "Benchmarking is a highly respected practice in the business world. It is an activity that looks outward to find best practice and high performance and then measures actual business operations against those goals."

Benchmarking is the practice of comparing a company's performance against others. It can be used to help clarify where you stand, relative to others, in those practices which matter most in your area of business. The technique can also be used to help companies become as good, or better than the best in the world in the most important aspects of their operations.One of the biggest mistakes people make when beginning their benchmarking endeavor is that they only look to benchmark someone within their own industry. Although this doesn't hurt, you probably already know enough about your industry to know what works and what doesn't. Worse yet, some people think they must benchmark their competitor. What if the competition is worse than your company? Seems like a pretty big waste of time end energy. Instead how about benchmarking a company that is well known for being a good model. Sometimes referred to as Best Practices, Exemplary Practices, Business Excellence. By Benchmarking you will find out;
Who performs the business process very well and has process practices that are adaptable to your own organization

Who is the most compatible for you to benchmark with

If you need to conduct a comprehensive benchmark study or if you can obtain 80-90% of what you need from just using the telephone, email, or an electronic survey to communicate your needs with other members on The Benchmarking Exchange
Most business processes are common throughout industry. For example; NASA has the same fundamental Human Resources requirements for hiring and developing employees as does American Express. British Telecom has the same Customer Satisfaction Survey process as Brooklyn Union Gas. These processes, albeit from different industries, are all common and can be benchmarked very effectively. It's called "getting out of the box".