Manufacturing excellence requires a manufacturer to be the best in its field in each competitive priority and to demonstrate industry best practice. This paper explores the validity and reliability of existing manufacturing excellence/world-class manufacturing frameworks when applied to Indian companies by means of a survey conducted across a wide range of manufacturing companies based in India. The nature of the questionnaire is outlined together with the results from the analysis of the data obtained from the questionnaire. This research has identified that while a majority of the frameworks display a high level of reliability, very few of them display unidimensionality with respect to the construct, i.e. the manufacturing excellence it measures. A frequency analysis shows that the majority of the attributes have a high mean score. As all the frameworks display different elements with some overlap among them, it was found that there is a need for a new framework. © IMechE 2008.