Benchmarking practices

To build and drive effective, sustainable, results-oriented, and truly transformational strategy— beyond benchmark practices— there are key considerations, tactics, and competencies that need to be either present or developed and put in place. Before I explain, here is what I mean by some of the words I just used ... 

The setting of quantitative goals for indoor air quality also supports an organization s quality policy in the area of safety and health. Furthermore, the introduction of the target level concept for indoor quality will enhance the development of more advanced and efficient control technologies on a voluntary basis. One can assume that the diffusion of technology will make the present-day benchmark air quality common practice in, say, 10 to 20 years. 

Sylvia Codling, Benchmarking (Gower, 1998) M Zaire and P Leonard, Practical Benchmarking, The Complete Guide (Chapman Hall)... 

Existing Quality Management processes outside of PSM or ESH are benchmarked to identify successful practices within your organization. This benchmarking may be extended outside your organization. 

Focus the benchmarking efforts on areas where current practices are weak, and on areas where additional information is needed on the potential benefits of integration. 

The counterflow configuration has been extensively utilized to provide benchmark experimental data for the study of stretched flame phenomena and the modeling of turbulent flames through the concept of laminar flamelets. Global flame properties of a fuel/oxidizer mixture obtained using this configuration, such as laminar flame speed and extinction stretch rate, have also been widely used as target responses for the development, validation, and optimization of a detailed reaction mechanism. In particular, extinction stretch rate represents a kinetics-affected phenomenon and characterizes the interaction between a characteristic flame time and a characteristic flow time. Furthermore, the study of extinction phenomena is of fundamental and practical importance in the field of combustion, and is closely related to the areas of safety, fire suppression, and control of combustion processes. 

A Benchmark Guidance value, set as a hygiene-based guidance value - actually a level which 90% of available validated data are below and therefore achievable by the great majority of industry with good workplace practices. 

We would like to end our contribution by reporting some recently obtained results, which stress the two main practical advantages of the UHC regime discussed in Sect. 10.2 the possibility of using very thin targets and the improved shot-to-shot reproducibility. This latter point makes UHC interaction experiments a good benchmark to test simulation codes and/or analytical models. 

A Benchmark Quiz is only practice. If you did not do as well as you anticipated, do not be alarmed and certainly do not despair. The purpose of the quiz is to help you focus your efforts so that you can improve. It is important to carefully analyze your results. Look beyond your score, and consider why you answered some questions incorrecdy. Here are some questions to ask yourself when you review your wrong answers ... 

Before you begin learning and reviewing the integers and absolute value, take a few minutes to take this ten-question Benchmark Quiz. These questions are similar to the type of questions that you will find on important tests. When you are finished, check the answer key carefully to assess your results. Your Benchmark Quiz analysis will help you determine how much time you need to spend on the integers and absolute value, and the specific areas in which you need the most careful review and practice. 

If you answered 1-3 questions correctly, give the lessons in this chapter your full concentration. Read carefully through all explanations. Try all examples on your own. Visit the suggested websites and work through any problems given. You may need to reference a suggested book that will present the material in an alternate form. After reviewing the lessons, retry the benchmark questions and then proceed to the practice problems. 

The goal of this chapter is twofold. First we wish to critically compare—from both a conceptional and a practical point of view—various classical and mixed quantum-classical strategies to describe non-Born-Oppenheimer dynamics. To this end. Section II introduces five multidimensional model problems, each representing a specific challenge for a classical description. Allowing for exact quantum-mechanical reference calculations, aU models have been used as benchmark problems to study approximate descriptions. In what follows, Section III describes in some detail the mean-field trajectory method and also discusses its connection to time-dependent self-consistent-field schemes. The surface-hopping method is considered in Section IV, which discusses various motivations of the ansatz as well as several variants of the implementation. Section V gives a brief account on the quantum-classical Liouville description and considers the possibility of an exact stochastic realization of its equation of motion. 

Since attention to detail is imperative, we continuously strive to improve through benchmarking among our locations on hundreds of metrics, putting to use best practices that continue to raise performance levels. During Fiscal 2004, we continued to see more warehousing and distribution efficiencies in our broadline companies that improved key expense metrics. . . ... 

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