Best practices is one of those great buzzwords that is really hard for people to object to. No one is going to object to striving for best practices. They may object to certain individual practices being proposed but not the idea.
This is the thing about buzzwords – defining them in a hard way is devilishly hard. If you poll 50 “top companies” in a given industry on a given process they will likely be about the same at the 50,000-foot view, roughly similar still at the 20,000-foot view, and almost no similarities at the 10-foot view.
For example, there really aren’t that many different ways to run finance while using SAP. However, almost no companies are going to use the same processing, routing, and approval workflows while they will also differ on data labeling and analysis practices. So if you say you are adopting industry finance best practices, at which level are you trying to match?
So if you say you are adopting industry finance best practices, at which level are you trying to match? You probably already match at the 50,000-foot level and you’ll never match at the 10-foot level. Do any of the details in between really matter? But again, no one is going to object to the attempt; they’ll only object to the details.