Large-scale Internet benchmarking: Technology and application in warehousing operations

Effective benchmarking requires standards for measuring performance across a broad range of organizations. Industry-benchmarking measures the relative performance levels of similar operations, but gathering sufficient data to robustly characterize best performance is the primary hurdle to more widespread implementation. This paper describes the development of an innovative, large-scale benchmarking methodology which employs Internet technology to overcome the data collection problem. We discuss a particular instance of this approach, iDEAs-W—the result of an ongoing collaboration between academia and the warehousing industry. This paper's purpose is to demonstrate the methodology for the warehousing industry and share our insights to allow others to refine the tool for applications in other industries.