Purpose – To provide the basis for the development of a specific benchmarking methodology for the foundry industry. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology was developed with the support of the Portuguese Foundry Association (APF). The project was structured in two stages: developing...

Purpose – To highlight a few critical issues related to indicators that are used to compare organizational practices. Design/methodology/approach – The approach is as follows: to compare the efficacy of qualitative and quantitative indicators; objectivity in identification of processes and...

Abstract Routinely collected administrative and clinical data are increasingly being utilized for comparing quality of care outcomes between hospitals. This problem can be considered in a causal inference framework, as such comparisons have to be adjusted for hospital-specific patient case-mix,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to attempt to provide a reference framework for the major properties of performance indicators, using the formalism of the Representation Theory. Design/methodology/approach – Performance indicators shown are commonly used in many different areas of...

Purpose – It is difficult to manage and measure the effectiveness of infrastructure development efforts of the sub‐district local governments called Tambon Administrative Organizations (TAOs), the lowest level of local governments in Thailand. This paper aims to develop and demonstrate the...

Purpose – This paper aims to present the findings of an investigation into environmental reporting practice in the airline sector. Design/methodology/approach – Evidence was gathered from an international survey of 272 IATA Airlines. Responses accounted 65 per cent of the world's scheduled...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test the applicability and benefits of benchmarking as a tool for quality analysis in Brazilian laboratory medical services. Design/methodology/approach – A primary observational study is performed in eight hospital laboratories by tracking the...

This paper shows that the measure of diffusion introduced by Ian Rowlands called the journal diffusion factor (JDF) is highly negatively correlated with the number of citations, leading highly cited journals to get a low JDF, whereas less cited journals get a high JDF. This property reduces the...

Purpose The difference between quality grades and quality labels is that the latter are awarded on the basis of production processes, whilst the former are conferred on the strength of the actual production results. In the course of a de-ideologisation of society, it might be assumed that the...

Purpose – The performance measurement system reflects the corporate strategy and overall business objectives of an organization. The alignment of the performance indicators with the company's critical operating factors, and the processes having bottle‐necks alongside the value chain, could...