Explores issues surrounding the recent evolution of benchmarking in the UK public sector with particular regard to local authorities. Argues that what is being done in the name of benchmarking in UK local authorities is fundamentally different to the current understanding of benchmarking...

Online auctions on the Internet have become popular. However, the communication techniques currently used in the online auction industry are primarily based on unicast technology. Unicast‐based online auctions suffer from unbearable delay of the communication between the auctioneer and...

Balanced scorecards are having a major impact on executives’ strategic decision making by encouraging their use of future‐oriented, non‐monetary success indicators. This article explains how to create a balanced scorecard with a reasonable number of indicators, set appropriate benchmarks...

Purpose – The paper aims to provide guidelines of companies in identifying their best practices with reference to a French example. Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes first the evolution of benchmarking, which nowadays is more and more based on the identification of good...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to offer small to medium‐sized organizations (SMOs) with global business aspirations an innovative approach to performance measurement and management. Design/methodology/approach – The first phase of this research is based on a literature review. The...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the longitudinal efficiency of branch operations of a third party logistics (3PL) company for comparative performance measurement and internal benchmarking. Design/methodology/approach – Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used for measuring...

A case study is described in which an audit programme was developed as a measure of health and safety performance. The audit programme was implemented as a safety competition in a UK water utility over a period of three years with the results also used for benchmarking the company’s health and...

Purpose – In a previous paper the authors emphasized the advantages of multicriteria methodologies to evaluate business performance. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the metachoice problem that always arises in a benchmark multicriteria analysis that can be synthesized as follows:...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the operational performance of industrial park infrastructures in Germany to find first indications for cost saving potentials. Design/methodology/approach – Between 2006 and 2007, six chemical parks and chemical related industrial parks in...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of using artificial neural networks (ANNs) in conjunction with data envelopment analysis (DEA) for the performance measurement of major mobile phone providers, and for subsequent predictions related to best performance...