Investors and portfolio managers sometimes use benchmarking as a tool in financial statement analysis. What benchmarks are familiar with in a business or personal life (and not necessarily just finance-related...)?
First of all define benchmarking, use a few sources, such as text book, and industry manuals, such as APICS dictionary, etc. Always define the terms you are using so you insure your reader understands what you are talking about. Use authoritative sources, publications that are well known and generally trusted as reliable.
benchmarking present participle of bench·mark (Verb)
1. Evaluate or check (something) by comparison with a standard: "we are benchmarking our performance against external criteria".
2. Evaluate or check something in this way: "we continue to benchmark against the competition".
A measurement of the quality of an organization's policies, products, programs, strategies, etc., and their comparison with standard measurements, or similar measurements of its peers.
The objectives of benchmarking are (1) to determine what and where improvements are called for, (2) to analyze how other organizations achieve their high performance levels, and ...
This solution discusses portfolio benchmarks.