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Benchmarking
Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost. Benchmarking is used to measure performance using a specific indicator (cost per unit of measure, productivity per unit of measure, cycle time of x per unit of measure or defects per unit of measure) resulting in a metric of performance that is then compared to others. Also referred to as "best practice benchmarking" or "process benchmarking", this process is used in management in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best-practice companies' processes, usually within a peer group defined for the purposes of comparison. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Benchmarking may be a one-off event, but is often t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Global Benchmarking Network
The Global Benchmarking Network (GBN) is an alliance of leading benchmarking Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost. Benchmarking is used to measure perform ... centres worldwide. Current membership comprises 20 benchmarking centres in 20 countries, which represent more than 30,000 businesses and government agencies. The GBN was founded in November 1994 by representatives from benchmarking centres in Germany, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Structure The GBN is a non-profit organization. Funding is raised from affiliates' annual fees and other sources approved at the annual meeting. It has a Chairman, a Vice Chairman, and a Secretary General. Services The GBN was established to promote and to support these core benefits for its affiliates: *to share experience in benchmarking c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Best Practice
A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to other known alternatives because it often produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing things, e.g., a standard way of complying with legal or ethical requirements. Best practices are used to maintain quality as an alternative to mandatory legislated standards and can be based on self-assessment or benchmarking. Best practice is a feature of accredited management standards such as ISO 9000 and ISO 14001. Some consulting firms specialize in the area of best practice and offer ready-made templates to standardize business process documentation. Sometimes a best practice is not applicable or is inappropriate for a particular organization's needs. A key strategic talent required when applying best practice to organizations is the ability to balance the unique qualities of an organization with the practices that it has in common ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Profit Impact Of Marketing Strategy
The Profit Impact of Market Strategy (PIMS) program is a project that uses empirical data to try to determine which business strategies make the difference between success and failure. It is used to develop strategies for resource allocation and marketing. Some of the most important strategic metrics are market share, product quality, investment intensity and service quality (all measured by PIMS and strongly correlated with financial performance). One of the emphasized principles is that the same factors work identically across different industries. The business management authors Tom Peters and Nancy Austin wrote that PIMS "yields solid evidence in support of both common sense and counter-intuitive principles for gaining and sustaining competitive advantage". History The PIMS project was originally initiated by senior managers of General Electric who wanted to know why some of their business units were more profitable than others. Under the direction of Sidney Schoeffler, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis (or SWOT matrix) is a strategic planning and strategic management technique used to help a person or organization identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats related to business competition or project planning. It is sometimes called situational assessment or situational analysis. Additional acronyms using the same components include TOWS and WOTS-UP. This technique is designed for use in the preliminary stages of decision-making processes and can be used as a tool for evaluation of the strategic position of organizations of many kinds (for-profit enterprises, local and national governments, NGOs, etc.). It is intended to identify the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving the objectives of the venture or project. Users of a SWOT analysis often ask and answer questions to generate meaningful information for each category to make the tool useful and identify their competitive advantage. SWOT has been described ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Business Process
A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a particular customer or customers. Business processes occur at all organizational levels and may or may not be visible to the customers. A business process may often be visualized (modeled) as a flowchart of a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or as a process matrix of a sequence of activities with relevance rules based on data in the process. The benefits of using business processes include improved customer satisfaction and improved agility for reacting to rapid market change. Process-oriented organizations break down the barriers of structural departments and try to avoid functional silos. Overview A business process begins with a mission objective (an external event) and ends with achievement of the business objecti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantitative Marketing Research
Quantitative marketing research is the application of quantitative research techniques to the field of marketing research. It has roots in both the positivist view of the world, and the modern marketing viewpoint that marketing is an interactive process in which both the buyer and seller reach a satisfying agreement on the "four Ps" of marketing: Product, Price, Place (location) and Promotion. As a social research method, it typically involves the construction of questionnaires and scales. People who respond (respondents) are asked to complete the survey. Marketers use the information to obtain and understand the needs of individuals in the marketplace, and to create strategies and marketing plans. Data collection The most popular quantitative marketing research method is a survey. Surveys typically contain a combination of structured questions and open questions. Survey participants respond to the same set of questions, which allows the researcher to easily compare responses ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stochastic Frontier Analysis
Stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) is a method of economic modeling. It has its starting point in the stochastic production frontier models simultaneously introduced by Aigner, Lovell and Schmidt (1977) and Meeusen and Van den Broeck (1977). The ''production frontier model'' without random component can be written as: y_i = f(x_i ;\beta ) \cdot TE_i the best where ''yi'' is the observed scalar output of the producer ''i'', ''i=1,..I, xi'' is a vector of ''N'' inputs used by the producer ''i'', ''f(xi, β)'' is the production frontier, and \beta is a vector of technology parameters to be estimated. ''TEi'' denotes the technical efficiency defined as the ratio of observed output to maximum feasible output. ''TEi = 1'' shows that the ''i-th'' firm obtains the maximum feasible output, while ''TEi < 1'' provides a measure of the shortfall of the observed output from maximum feasible output. A stochastic component that describes random shocks affecting the production process is ad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Regression Analysis
In statistical modeling, regression analysis is a set of statistical processes for estimating the relationships between a dependent variable (often called the 'outcome' or 'response' variable, or a 'label' in machine learning parlance) and one or more independent variables (often called 'predictors', 'covariates', 'explanatory variables' or 'features'). The most common form of regression analysis is linear regression, in which one finds the line (or a more complex linear combination) that most closely fits the data according to a specific mathematical criterion. For example, the method of ordinary least squares computes the unique line (or hyperplane) that minimizes the sum of squared differences between the true data and that line (or hyperplane). For specific mathematical reasons (see linear regression), this allows the researcher to estimate the conditional expectation (or population average value) of the dependent variable when the independent variables take on a give ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Data Envelopment Analysis
Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a nonparametric method in operations research and economics for the estimation of production frontiers.Charnes et al (1978) DEA has been applied in a large range of fields including international banking, economic sustainability, police department operations, and logistical applicationsCharnes et al (1995) Emrouznejad et al (2016)Thanassoulis (1995) Additionally, DEA has been used to assess the performance of natural language processing models, and it has found other applications within machine learning.Zhou et al (2022)Guerrero et al (2022) Description DEA is used to empirically measure productive efficiency of decision-making units (DMUs). Although DEA has a strong link to production theory in economics, the method is also used for benchmarking in operations management, whereby a set of measures is selected to benchmark the performance of manufacturing and service operations. In benchmarking, the efficient DMUs, as defined by DEA, may not n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Questionnaire Construction
Questionnaire construction refers to the design of a questionnaire to gather statistically useful information about a given topic. When properly constructed and responsibly administered, questionnaires can provide valuable data about any given subject. Questionnaires Questionnaires are frequently used in quantitative marketing research and social research. They are a valuable method of collecting a wide range of information from a large number of individuals, often referred to as respondents. What is often referred to as "adequate questionnaire construction" is critical to the success of a survey. Inappropriate questions, incorrect ordering of questions, incorrect scaling, or a bad questionnaire format can make the survey results valueless, as they may not accurately reflect the views and opinions of the participants. Different methods can be useful for checking a questionnaire and making sure it is accurately capturing the intended information. Initial advice may include: * cons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistical Survey
Survey methodology is "the study of survey methods". As a field of applied statistics concentrating on human-research surveys, survey methodology studies the sampling of individual units from a population and associated techniques of survey data collection, such as questionnaire construction and methods for improving the number and accuracy of responses to surveys. Survey methodology targets instruments or procedures that ask one or more questions that may or may not be answered. Researchers carry out statistical surveys with a view towards making statistical inferences about the population being studied; such inferences depend strongly on the survey questions used. Polls about public opinion, public-health surveys, market-research surveys, government surveys and censuses all exemplify quantitative research that uses survey methodology to answer questions about a population. Although censuses do not include a "sample", they do include other aspects of survey methodology, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Focus Group
A focus group is a group interview involving a small number of demographically similar people or participants who have other common traits/experiences. Their reactions to specific researcher/evaluator-posed questions are studied. Focus groups are used in market research to understand better people's reactions to products or services or participants' perceptions of shared experiences. The discussions can be guided or open. In market research, focus groups can explore a group's response to a new product or service. As a program evaluation tool, they can elicit lessons learned and recommendations for performance improvement. The idea is for the researcher to understand participants' reactions. If group members are representative of a larger population, those reactions may be expected to reflect the views of that larger population. Thus, focus groups constitute a research or evaluation method that researchers organize to collect qualitative data through interactive and directed discuss ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
