A brief introduction to benchmarking is provided here:

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchmarking

There are many types of benchmarks, e.g., product and technical, performance or functional benchmarks. The effort to produce benchmarks depends on the process applied and can be both time consuming and costly. Benchmarking often relies on qualitative judgments of experts due to the high effort required to collect or a lack of qualitative data.
EIDOS ideally supports the capturing of expert valuations and supports benchmarking analysis from different perspectives.

EIDOS provides two different templates and visualizations to support benchmarking. One can be applied in a workshop and the other template starts with feeding data from Excel and allows for the comprehensive analysis of the results after the import to the Visual Scoremap tool.