Editing Benchmarking (section)

==Cost==
The three main types of costs in benchmarking are:
* Visit Costs - This includes hotel rooms, travel costs, meals, a token gift, and lost labor time.
* Time Costs - Members of the benchmarking team will be investing time in researching problems, finding exceptional companies to study, visits, and implementation. This will take them away from their regular tasks for part of each day so additional staff might be required.
* Benchmarking Database Costs - Organizations that institutionalize benchmarking into their daily procedures find it is useful to create and maintain a database of best practices and the companies associated with each best practice now.

The cost of benchmarking can substantially be reduced through utilizing the many internet resources that have sprung up over the last few years. These aim to capture benchmarks and best practices from organizations, business sectors and countries to make the benchmarking process much quicker and cheaper.<ref>[http://logisticsbureau.com/what-is-benchmarking-save-supply-chain-costs/ "What is Benchmarking? Save Supply Chain Costs"] Retrieved 2014-3-25.</ref>