One of the keys to effectively running a world-class company is finding ways to constantly increase productivity. It doesn't matter if you are a designer, photographer, a prepress operator, or a print service provider—the faster you can turn around jobs, the cheaper you can produce a product and the more work you can do with fewer resources. This level of productivity will keep customers coming back for more. Leading companies typically share a common critical success factor: they measure their operational performance and measure their performance against that of other companies. Furthermore, when these organizations fare poorly in these benchmarks, they take action to increase their performance.

Operational performance measurements can be conducted daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, and they typically measure the performance of staff members and equipment relative to manufacturing products or services. The simplest measure is productivity over time, such as sheets printed per hour, pages inserted per day, mistakes made per week, or paper wasted per month. The more complex—and often better—measurements are based on ratios, such as the percentage of good plates vs. bad plates or the percentage of paper sold vs. paper recycled.

While many companies have intuitive feelings about the productivity of individual staff members or pieces of equipment, most don't have any measurements of operational performance. As a result, the most common question that we are asked during operational performance evaluations is, "How does our performance compare to that of the average company and that of the industry leaders?” When benchmarking their productivity and manufacturing costs, businesses really want to understand how they fare in relation to their competitors.