Fifty Years of Benchmarking

	The Centre for InterFirm Comparison has nearly fifty years of experience in providing benchmarking services to industry.
	The Centre was one of the pioneers of benchmarking; it developed the concept of comparing company performance using management ratios from a few simple measures with sophisticated analytical studies.
	It was set up by the British Institute of Management (now the Institute of Management) and the British Productivity Council on 21st September 1959, its founding Directors being Herbert Ingham and Leslie Taylor Harrington who had developed the methodology whilst at BIM.
	Its objectives were to enable companies to assess their performance against that of their peers and so identify areas for improvement. To that would be added today "identify and implement best practice".
	The Centre has worked in over 140 industry sectors and has helped to establish benchmarking programmes at productivity organisations in Australia, Canada, France, Ghana, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Uganda, United States and Yemen.
	It has carried out studies in most sectors of manufacturing industry, in financial services and other service sectors, retailing, in government and the public sector, and for charities.
	Recent projects have included work for the Hong Kong MTR on performance measurement, benchmarking the legal and surveying professions, customer service benchmarking for direct insurers, a variety of studies for the water industry and a magazine publishing study.