Benchmarking application based on internal customer satisfaction

Abstract

Many enterprises confront serious difficulties when they decide to undertake a continuous improvement of their performance. Among the approaches which may help an enterprise to improve its performance, benchmarking is required today as one of the most efficient and effective management tool. However, benchmarking seems often lacking a modeled and theoretical thinking which hinders the benefits and makes difficult the reuse of realized experiments. The aim of this thesis is to formalize the benchmarking process and to propose the tools and methods accompanying the steps of that process. We have grouped benchmarking process into five phases, and our work focuses on the first two phases of this process: measurement and analysis of internal performance of the enterprise's core processes (phase 1), and determination of subject and partners of a benchmarking study (phase 2). For this purpose, related to the first phase, a method of diagnosis, which relies on the Olympios model, is employed. This model is based on the assessment of internal customer satisfaction. Enterprise information is structured through this instrument and consequently strong and weak points are identified. In the second phase, three different methods of data analysis (lexical analysis, principal components analysis and common factor analysis) are utilized.These phases serve the purpose of an internal benchmarking (comparison between different domains of activities in the enterprise) and of an external benchmarking study (comparison between different enterprises). Three data enterprises are selected for the benchmarking application. Related data are collected and analyzed, and results are reported