The American Productivity and Quality Center, in concert with several of the world’s leading organizations, has created the Open Standards Benchmarking Collaborative.

The program seeks to establish, lead and promote an open, universal process framework, related performance measures and benchmark data.

"Today, organizations rely on third-party evaluations of their performance with no real view of the analytical accuracy or beyond their industry or geography," says Carla O’Dell, APQC president. "Most crave a better way to compare and benchmark themselves openly with their peers. The Open Standards Benchmarking Collaborative introduces a higher level of performance quality to organizations worldwide."

As part of the initiative, APQC has formed an advisory council of industry experts to ensure relevancy to all business groups. Advisory council members include representatives from Alvarez and Marsal, Boehringer Ingelheim, Booz Allen Hamilton, CEMEX, Fuji Xerox, Gartner Consulting, IBM, PeopleSoft, Procter and Gamble, Raytheon, Shell Oil Co., University of Texas M.D. Anderson, U.S. Navy and World Bank.

PowerMARQ, APQC’s database of standardized process measures and benchmarks, will collect performance data from participating organizations using a consistent set of common processes and measures to accurately compare performance within and across industries. The development of standard worldwide benchmarking measures is expected to give performance improvement greater visibility, leading to organizational productivity, quality and innovation improvements.

Organizations using PowerMARQ will enter their quantitative and qualitative performance data based on approximately 1,000 commonly used measures and benchmarks that track performance. Data will be verified for accuracy by APQC. Participating organizations will then have access to blind and aggregate data for all other participants to compare performance, understand best practices and identify weaknesses.

For more information on the collaborative, click here.