ARC Advisory Group and Leading Manufacturers Launch the Benchmarking Consortium.

DEDHAM, Mass. -- In the quest to achieve operational excellence and continuous improvement, more and more manufacturers are discovering the value of industry benchmarking. Benchmarking your plant's performance against others yields specific data on the success of your automation strategy,

determines whether you are achieving the needed ROI, and identifies where and how to improve your strategies and investments in the future. To facilitate this, ARC Advisory Group and a group of approximately 40 process industry manufacturers joined together to launch the Benchmarking Consortium. The Benchmarking Consortium's aim is to establish common metrics for benchmarking the performance and practices for automation, control, and related maintenance assets and resources.

Current Progress and Goals

Initially launched in January 2005, the Consortium has created several different working groups representing 16 companies. Through the diligent efforts of these working groups, 18 metrics have already been identified. The immediate goal is to grow the consortium with companies from the Oil/Gas/Refining, Chemicals, Pulp & Paper, and Life Sciences industries. These companies would share their actual plant data on specific metrics in return for receiving comparable data on the same metric from others in the industry.

Identification of Metrics

Since the Benchmarking Consortium was launched, there has been an active core of process owner-operators to guide the identification of suitable metrics. They have also created the related collection and calculation methods to be employed to ensure comparability of the metrics when displayed together for benchmarking purposes.

There are 10 teams within this Working Group. The first 5 teams formed were focused on functional groupings of metrics, for example, APC, alarms, and regulatory control. Additional teams are focused on industry specific metrics; for example Oil/Gas/Refining, Chemicals, Pulp & Paper, and Life Sciences.

Current Working Group participants include Air Products & Chemicals, BASF, BP, Celanese Chemicals, Chevron, Citgo, Cytec, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Hercules, Lyondell, Rohm and Haas, SASOL, and Weyerhaeuser.

How to Participate

The Working Group teams continue to develop metrics and provide stewardship to the activities of the Benchmarking Consortium. Anyone can join the Working Group, but each Working Group member is expected to contribute by attending group meetings held monthly as well as individual team meetings as required.

New metrics will be introduced every year and existing metrics will be improved as experience is gained on collection and calculation methods. Although the initial metrics are centered around automation and control, the boundaries of benchmarking will no doubt expand to include areas like IT infrastructure for automation as well as additional industry sectors, as the consortium's needs expand. This is your opportunity to participate and help formulate its future.

For more information, contact John Wason at 781-471-1150 or email at jwason@arcweb.com.

Founded in 1986, ARC Advisory Group has grown to become the Thought Leader in Manufacturing and Supply Chain solutions. No matter how complex your business issues, our analysts have the expert industry knowledge and first-hand experience to help you find the best answer. We focus on simple yet critical goals: improving your return on assets, operational performance, total cost of ownership, project time-to-benefit, and share-holder value. Further information can be obtained from ARC, Three Allied Drive, Dedham, MA 02026, 781-471-1000, Fax 781-471-1100, E-mail info@arcweb.com, Web www.arcweb.com.