Amir Shafiei Jam - Fist Author: Msc. Manufacturing Systems Engineering, WMG Department, Warwick University
Jay Bal - Second author: PhD. Knowledge Based Systems, Warwick University.
Morteza Mousakhani - Third author:PhD Management, Tarbiat Modares University, Iran.

With intense global competition, every single business needs to continually provide most excellent serivces, bring into being novel products and implement innovative procedures to beat their competition and increase market share. This article aims to study, compare and contrast Mx Start, an online assessment tool, designed to help performance evaluatation of small and medium size manufacturing companies and direct them to further sources of help and advice on the journey to excellence. MX Start provides an easy to use, free of charge, web based system that facilitates manufacturing companies to start their excellence journey. It enables manufacturers to benchmark themselves against best practice in order to gain a greater understanding of what excellence entails, and to enable improvement areas to be identified. It is concluded that MX Start can identify areas in which a company needs to improve and successfully project a professional image of an online benchmrking tool. to enrich the performance of MXStart some recommendations were brought out to provide familiar manufacturing businesses requirements. In addition to benchmarking of a business, continious improvements methods can make so positive contributions in MX Start to accomplish exellence journey. In sum, Mx Start as a combination of various benchmarking methods, can be assumed and applied as an practical benchmarking tool.

MX Start, online benchmarking tool, excellence journey, performance evaluation