Best practice in business

Best practice in business means finding - and using - the best ways of working to achieve your business goals. It involves keeping up to date with the ways that successful businesses operate, and measuring your ways of working against those used by the market leaders across your and other sectors.

This measuring is known as 'benchmarking'. It allows you to compare your business with other successful businesses and highlight areas where your business could improve. See how to benchmark your business performance.

Benefits of best practice for businesses

By following best practices and benchmarking against other businesses, you can:

• become more competitive
• increase sales and develop new markets
• reduce costs and become more efficient
• improve the skills of your workforce
• use technology more effectively
• reduce waste and improve quality
• respond more quickly to innovations in your sector

Standards for best business practice

Standards are fixed specifications or benchmarks, which are established by independent bodies such as the British Standards Institution (BSI). BSI develops two main types of standards:

• technical standards - precise specifications against which you can measure the quality of your product, service or processes
• management standards - models for achieving best business and organisational practice

Conforming to the right standards will enable you to apply best practice across your business. It will allow you to work against objective criteria to achieve manufacturing or service quality. See how to make best use of standards.