What is best practice in business?
Understand what best practice means in business, and how it can impact your business operations, competitiveness and profitability.
Best practice in business means finding - and using - the most effective 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 successful peers across sectors. Use it to highlight gaps in efficiency, quality and innovation, and identify where your business could improve. See how to benchmark your business performance.
Benefits of best practice for businesses
Adopting best practice can help you:
- 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, established by independent bodies such as the British Standards Institution (BSI). They cover:
- 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
Applying the right standards will help you embed best practice across your business, and check your work against objective criteria - for example, in manufacturing or service quality. See how to make best use of standards.