This document provides information on benchmarking and Total Quality Management (TQM) practices. It discusses benchmarking as a process of systematically searching for best practices and comparing a company's performance to top performers. The benchmarking process involves deciding what to benchmark, understanding current performance, planning benchmarking studies, studying other organizations, learning from data collected, and using findings to improve. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Taguchi Methods are also introduced as important TQM practices for linking customer requirements to product development and designing robust processes.