Benchmarking is recognised as an essential tool for continuous improvement of quality. A large number of publications by various authors reflect the interest in this technique. Reviews of literature on benchmarking have been done in the past by a few authors. However, considering the contributions in the recent times, a more comprehensive review is attempted here. In this paper, the authors have reviewed benchmarking literature in a way that would help researchers, academicians and practitioners to take a closer look at the growth, development and applicability of this technique. The authors have examined various papers and have proposed a different scheme of classification. In addition, certain gaps that would provide hints for further research in benchmarking have been identified.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractThe increasing demand for postgraduate education in management in India has resulted in a steep rise in the number of institutes offering such education. However, the quality of education offered in many institutes is seriously being debated by students and prospective employers. The efforts to improve quality appear minimal, resulting in little or no improvement in quality. Provides a summary of status of quality in management education and critically analyses the issue of quality with the backdrop of problems, constraints, and conflicts. Further, the paper describes the structure and pattern of postgraduate management education as offered in India, along with a description of regulatory agencies existing in the country to monitor the standards of management education. Towards the end, suggests appropriate solutions with several alternatives, to improve quality, discussing also their feasibility. The general objective is to provide help to develop strategies for improving quality of postgraduate education in management. Electronic accessThe current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

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Manufacturing systems are gearing up to meet the challenges of quality‐based competition. Process capability study and analysis have become critical issues in process control and a number of guidelines are available for process capability assessment. However, certain conditions like normally distributed output, statistical independence of observed values and existence of only random variation due to chance causes are stipulated for this assessment. All these conditions may not be completely satisfied in a practical set‐up and departures from these conditions are quite likely to occur. Tool wear is one such dominant and inseparable component in many of the machining processes, and hence it constitutes a systematic assignable cause. Process capability assessment in such cases becomes tricky as the usual procedure will not give accurate results. A real life case study has been considered for detailed analysis. Various approaches of process capability assessment are used. Analyses the results obtained to bring forth a number of critical issues common to such situations. Presents the salient details of the results obtained and various analyses made.

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