Through the years pharmaceutical companies have managed to apply Operational Excellence (OPEX) and Lean-thinking to their operations. Nevertheless, the majority still lacks behind when incorporating an end-to-end perspective. A first step to holistically assess the performance of pharmaceutical companies necessarily incorporates quality control (QC) in addition to manufacturing. Therefore, the St.Gallen QC Lab Benchmarking helps to position pharmaceutical QC labs from a broad range of pharmaceutical companies against each other.