The Economics of Benchmarking: Measuring Performance for Competitive Advantage

ISBN-13: 9780230224384 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 128 str.

Thijs ten Raa; Thijs Ten Raa

Opis

For businesses seeking to gain the edge over their competitors, benchmarking is an increasingly popular tool used to compare operations and performance. ten Raa elegantly presents the techniques and theory to explain how performance indices and rankings are developed and how they can be used to improve efficiency, productivity and profitability.

Spis treści

What is Benchmarking and Why is it Useful?.- Linear Programming in one Lesson.- The Technique of Benchmarking.- Case study 1: Spanish Restaurants.- Case study 2: Indian Banks.- Case study 3: Korean Quality Management.- Case study 4: Austrian Banking Deregulation.- Efficiency, Productivity and Profitability.- Case study 5: U.S. Manufacturing.- Case study 6: U.S. Hotels.- Case study 7: European Railways Efficiency.- Ranking.- Case study 8: Dutch Economics and Business Schools.- Returns to Scale.- Case study 9: U.S. Real Estate Investment Trusts.- Case study 10: European Railways Returns to Scale.- Concluding Remarks.

O autorze

Thijs ten Raa has been affiliated with NYU and Erasmus University and is now Associate Professor of Economics at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He has published eight books, and numerous articles. In 2006 he was awarded the Wassily Leontief Centennial Medal.

Blurb

Benchmarking is a process designed to enhance firm or business unit perfomance by evaluating products, processes or functions against industry best practice. But many managers remain sceptical. Does benchmarking really deliver reliable measures of relative performance?
 
In this compact and self-contained book, Thijs ten Raa demonstrates the power of benchmarking. He presents the tools, theory, and practice of benchmarking, explaining the principles that underlie the most commonly used technique, and shows how useful economic information about efficiency, productivity and profitability can be gleaned from it. Benchmarking has always been plagued by the problem of assigning weights to different performance scores, but ten Raa solves that problem, providing rational performance indices and rankings.
 
The book features Excel screenshots to guide the readeer through applications, and real-world case studies are included throughout.