Benchmarking of processes for managing product platforms: a case study

A case study is presented in which two organisations have participated in a benchmarking initiative to discover improvement suggestions for their processes for managing product platforms. The initiative, based on an instrument which consists of a list of questions, has been developed as part of this study and contains eight major categories of questions that guide the participating organisations to describe their processes. The descriptions were then reviewed by the organisations cross-wise in order to identify areas for improvement. The major objective of the case study is to evaluate the benchmarking procedure and instrument in practice. The result is that the benchmarking procedure with the benchmarking instrument has been well received in the study. It was therefore concluded that the approach is probably applicable for other similar organisations as well.