Applying the Benchmarking Process at the New Circulation Fulfillment Division at American City Business Journals.
Executive Summary.
Benchmarking can be thought of as the process of identifying, understanding, and adapting outstanding practices from organizations anywhere in the world to help your organization improve its performance. By benchmarking an organization can find out which companies perform a certain business process very well and has process practices that are adaptable to your own organization as well as which organization is the most compatible for you to benchmark. We will examine how a Charlotte, NC company has experienced success in applying the benchmarking process to parts of their supply chain.
American City Business Journals and the National Circulation Fulfillment Division.
Founded twenty-five years ago, American City Business Journals (ACBJ) is the publisher of forty-one business journal publications, five sports publications and one hobby-inspired publication. Each publication operates independently, but all are owned and directed by the corporate offices of American City Business Journals. ACBJ's headquarters are in Charlotte, NC and they employee approximately 1900 people in over fifty cities across the United States. In the summer of 2002, ACBJ created a new division of thirty-five employees, which would support their publications. ACBJ brought the circulation and fulfillment of their publications in-house in order to save money and keep all operations centralized within the company. The staff of 35 ranges from data entry technicians to the president of the division. The new National Circulation Fulfillment Center at ACBJ is responsible for entering new orders and trial subscriptions for individuals, generate marketing campaigns, produce address labels & postage statements and reconcile all the money coming through the center. As time progresses and the Center grows, it will be responsible for processing all orders for all publications, fulfilling all internal publications and providing fulfillment services to other publishing companies.