Insights on Excellence® Benchmarking Tool
Participation in the Insights on Excellence® (IoE) Benchmarking Tool is a leading benefit within all three of the ASQ Organizational Membership levels, providing custom insights through performance-based maturity model scoring. By taking the IoE Benchmarking Tool’s survey each year, your organization will highlight emerging industry trends across our nine established categories of organizational performance and the new Cost of Quality category to bring real-world metrics and insights to the quality community for actionable improvement.
Once complete, the IoE Benchmarking Tool also supplies ASQ Organizational Member employees with a results dashboard, custom reports, performance definitions, global benchmarking comparisons, and ASQ resources to assist in pursuing performance excellence and workforce upskilling. Share results within teams to either help prioritize areas for improvement or gain consensus. New for 2025, benchmarking participants earn Recertification Units within the Professional Development category of ASQ's Recertification Journal.
Benchmarking results are compiled annually by ASQE to create industry- and category-specific reports and thought-leadership events like the Ascend Webinars and Excellence Roundtable for our members to engage with.
Insights on Excellence® Benchmarking Tool Info Session
Watch the live Member Benefit Session to explore more about the IoE Benchmarking Tool – and learn about what it measures, how it works, and the value it can provide your organization.
If you want to use the IoE Benchmarking Tool but aren’t yet an ASQ Organizational Member, explore the ASQ Organizational Membership levels and join us today!
About the Tool
The IoE Benchmarking Tool survey has an initial portion of demographic-based questions to define the Survey Participant’s industry, role, and location, followed by nine categories of business topics focused on organizational excellence performance areas: Operations, Voice of the Customer, Workforce, Leadership, Strategy, Technology, Measurements & Results, Barriers & Disruptors, and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices. These categories provide overall performance results and customized reports.
Survey Process and Using Results
Each of the IoE categories are structured as sets of questions, specific to that topic. There are a variety of question types, including single choice, multiple choice, or scale ratings.
Once a Survey Participant submits all their answers, the next screen is the Results Dashboard, which contains a comprehensive overview of their survey selections and adds up to an overall performance level score.
This overall score contains a description about the current performance of their organization, provides nine category-specific scores, and provides resources to assist in their quality journey.
IoE Maturity Model of Performance Excellence
Level 1: Reactive
Your organization has taken initial steps to establish a quality mindset; however, significant opportunity remains to enhance business performance.
Level 2: Proactive
Your organization has likely matured to where you view quality less as a necessity for compliance and more of an activity to leverage for competitive differentiation.
Level 3: Progressive
Your organization has already successfully demonstrated the business case for quality, continuous improvement, proactive measurement.
Level 4: Predictive
Quality and operational excellence programs have been embedded in the DNA of your customer-centric organization.
IoE Reports Overview
Summary Report
The Summary Report gives each Survey Participant an overall view of their scores by category, additional context on the meaning of those scores, and provides resources for key areas of improvement. Download the report and use it to discuss opportunities for continuous improvement with colleagues, or as a performance summary for leadership.
Category Report
Each of the nine established categories provide a report that includes information on how the Survey Participant’s score compares to the current Global Benchmark. At this time, the tenth Cost of Quality category is not scored. Download and review reports to understand areas of higher performance and areas requiring improvement. Participants can also compare categories to further explore results and gain insight into each performance area and use each report’s discussion question worksheet to assist in facilitating internal improvement efforts.
IoE Elaboration Report
Once a company’s survey time frame has officially closed, ASQE offers Primary Contacts the opportunity to request an IoE Elaboration Report, which contains an overall summary score for all of the organization’s Survey Participants, plus a summary score for each of the nine categories.
Certificate of Completion and Recertification Units
Beginning in April 2025, each participant that completes the IoE Benchmarking Survey earns a customized Certificate recognizing their time and commitment to pursuing organizational excellence. This Certificate of Completion also contains confirmation of their Recertification Unit (RU) award of 0.1 units, which is categorized in ASQ’s Recertification Journal under Professional Development. In the spirit of our mission to support organizations in their performance excellence journey, ASQE is pleased to offer this professional development opportunity to our valued member community.
The Connected Journey Between ASQ, ASQE, and ASQConnEx
Excellence through quality is the shared mission of ASQ and ASQE. This video will take you through the complete connected journey between ASQ, ASQE, and ASQConnEx—a system that connects year-over-year industry data with the global research being done by ASQE to foster continuous improvement.
The ASQE IoE Benchmarking Tool question set was created with input and review by ASQ Technical Community subject matter experts, and the year-over-year research it provides identifies emerging trends across all industries and facilitates knowledge sharing and content creation across ASQ and ASQE. Together our associations seek to inspire excellence, foster continuous improvement, and use data and best-in-class education to ensure that members make an impact.