This paper presents a case study examining the role of performance measurement systems in setting organizational ‘direction’. There is a growing concern in the existing literature to link the development of organizational ‘direction’ with performance measurement systems. Furthermore, the...

In this paper we propose a data envelopment analysis (DEA) based method for assessing the comparative efficiencies of units operating production processes where input–output levels are inter-temporally dependent. One cause of inter-temporal dependence between input and output levels is capital...

The efficiency literature, both using parametric and non-parametric methods, has been focusing mainly on cost efficiency analysis rather than on profit efficiency. In for-profit organisations, however, the measurement of profit efficiency and its decomposition into technical and allocative...

The pricing of Big 4 industry leadership is examined for a sample of U.K. publicly-listed companies, and adds to the evidence from the Australian and U.S. audit markets that city-specific industry leadership commands a fee premium. There is a significant fee premium for city-specific industry...

In the National Health Service (NHS) in England and Wales an oversight body, the Audit Commission (AC), defines the scope of the external auditors' work, appoints the auditors and has oversight of their fees and audit quality. This heavily regulated audit regime mitigates some of the...

Purpose – This paper aims to describe an investigation into how company performance can be improved by integrating internal and external customers and technology. The approach was developed, implemented and evaluated in the operations of the building components industry. The research was...

Linear models reach their limitations in applications with nonlinearities in the data. In this paper we provide new empirical evidence on the relative Euro inflation forecasting performance of linear and nonlinear models. The well established and widely used univariate ARIMA and multivariate VAR...

Purpose – The purpose of the work discussed in this paper is to understand, analyse and benchmark the “Packing and Filling” processes within BASF. A benchmarking project is described in detail which aimed to cover sites in different countries that supplied many different variants of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe how the application of systems thinking to designing, managing and improving business processes has resulted in a new and unique holonic-based process modeling methodology know as process orientated holonic...