Benchmarking to improve all aspects of cement plant performance

Benchmarking is a well-established tool for performance comparison and a necessary first step in any performance improvement process. It measures current performance against appropriate peers, and the gap between current performance and best practice. This allows reasonable objectives and targets to be set and plans to be drafted to achieve those objectives and targets. However, benchmarking can be conducted at a number of levels, in a number of ways, and consider multiple aspects of the management and operation of a cement business. Different audiences within a cement company want different levels of management information from performance benchmarking. This paper illustrates some of the possibilities with reference to examples.