Performance Evaluation of Mx Start; An online benchmarking tool

With intense global competition, every single business strives to uncover some ways to implement best techniques, enhance business performance and eventually improve benefits of two dealing sides (provider-customer). Currently diverse tools and techniques have been applied to achieve manufacturing superiority. Nowadays, benchmarking is one of the most popular business improvement methods, identified as the pioneer of assessment techniques. Benchmarking is a comprehensive solution which is utilized in different areas of expertise to compare parameters such as financial and marketing issues, cycle time, availability, dependability, quality of a specific product/ service, supply chain performance, productivity and efficiency of implemented processes and methods, with other companies which have been widely accepted as an industry standard of best practice . This article aims to study, compare and contrast Mx Start, an online benchmarking tool, designed to help performance evaluation of small and medium size manufacturing companies and direct them to further sources of help and advice on the journey to excellence. MX Start provides an easy to use, free of charge, web based system that facilitates manufacturing companies to start their excellence journey. It enables manufacturers to benchmark themselves against best practice in order to gain a greater understanding of what excellence entails, and to enable improvement areas to be identified. It is concluded that MxStart can identify areas in which a company needs to improve and successfully project a professional image of an online benchmarking tool. To enrich the performance of MxStart some recommendations were brought out to provide familiar manufacturing businesses requirements. In addition to benchmarking of a business, continuous improvements methods can make so positive contributions in MxStart to accomplish excellence journey. In sum, MxStart as a combination of various benchmarking methods, can be assumed and applied as a practical benchmarking tool.