Juan-José Alfaro-Saiz

An ANP-multi-criteria-based methodology to link intangible assets and organizational performance in a Balanced Scorecard context

In the current knowledge society, both intangible assets (IAs) and intellectual capital (IC) are considered some of the key drivers of value creation and competitive advantage generation for organizations by both researchers and practitioners. A wide range of models and methods have been developed from the 90s, with different approaches and from diverse management perspectives, with the objective of measuring and managing these two concepts. However, only a few of them are integrated in a performance measurement system context and analyze the relationships among the intangible assets and the strategic objectives defined within this context. This paper aims to develop a methodology for identifying, measuring and managing the relevance of intangible assets in the achievement of an organizations strategic objectives as defined in the Balanced Scorecard context. Within the methodology, the Analytic Network Process (ANP) is applied as a useful tool for both the representation of the relationships between the intangible assets and the strategic objectives and the evaluation of the impact of the intangible assets on the attainment of the strategic objectives. The proposed methodology was applied in a university research center in order to confirm the benefits that it provides in the management of intangible assets. ANP is applied to link management concepts, mainly intellectual capital and performance management, in order to improve organizational decision-making processes.This work improves the efforts of performance management to situate, measure, manage and link intellectual capital to organizational performance.The methodology presented is novel, as none scientific work has brought together these concepts/methodologies in such a sound and mathematically linked way.The results of applying this methodology to a university research centre are presented and analyzed.

Prioritization and management of inter-enterprise collaborative performance

Collaboration among enterprises has gained attention in the business environment as a means to remain competitive. Enterprises that are collaborating look for improving their performance but, in real assessments, they often do not establish efficient frameworks to structure and manage the enterprise association/inter-enterprise performance. This paper provides a methodology based on the Analytic Network Process (ANP) to prioritize and manage, within a performance management framework, inter-enterprise performance. In addition, this approach allows managing the evolution of the performance status by introducing a model for aggregating actual performance data so that decision makers can evaluate the status of the collaborative relationship and analyze the degree of achievement of the strategy. With this innovative approach, enterprises will obtain significant information for the decision-making process regarding which are the inter-enterprise performance elements that generate a higher impact and, therefore, should be prioritized for improving the enterprise competitiveness. This approach has been applied to a collaborative enterprise network belonging to the renewable energy sector in Spain where managers of the network have validated the results obtained as well as the benefits of the approach in supporting the decision making process. Highlights? We present a methodology to prioritize and manage collaborative relationships. ? It allows to aggregate actual performance data into a global evaluation. ? It focuses on analyzing the degree of achievement of the strategy. ? ANP is used to model and solve the problem. ? A case study is presented.

The analytic network process for managing inter-enterprise collaboration: A case study in a collaborative enterprise network

In the last years, collaboration among enterprises has gained attention in the business environment as a means to remain competitive. Enterprises that are collaborating look for improving their performance but, in real assessments, they often do not establish efficient frameworks to structure and manage the enterprise association/inter-enterprise performance. In addition, there are many factors that act as barriers to effective collaboration and have to be also properly managed as they impact on the inter-enterprise performance. This paper provides a methodology based on the analytic network process (ANP) to identify and measure, under an integrated approach, both factors and inter-enterprise performance considering their reciprocal impact. With this innovative approach, enterprises will obtain significant information for the decision-making process regarding which are the factors and inter-enterprise performance elements that generate a higher impact and therefore have a high priority within the specific collaborative relationship. Thus, enterprises can focus their efforts on improving those most important factors and performance elements, and consequently, enhancing their competitiveness.

Seeking organisational excellence by using the information coming from the EFQM excellence model as starting point: application to a real case

This paper describes how to use the information coming from applying the EFQM excellence model to analyse the perception that the members of an organisation have of it regarding their business vision. Such an analysis is made on the basis of the EFQM excellence model criteria and by applying statistical data analysis techniques. With this study, besides detecting both the strong and weak areas of actuation on which an organisation should focus and act, it is also possible to detect the relationships between the personal characteristics of members of the organisation and their business vision. The main goal is that organisations are able to reach excellence by jointly using an assessment method (the EFQM excellence model) and posterior statistical data analysis techniques (uni-variant and multi-variant). These techniques enable one to complement and enlarge the potential of the EFQM excellence model. Finally, the procedure is illustrated by presenting the main results of applying it to a real case of the Permanent Training Centre of the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain.

A performance measurement framework for monitoring supply chain sustainability.

In the competitive business environment achieving sustainable supply chains is an issue that is still to be solved despite its relevance. For that reason, there are several tools that have emerged in the last years to aid to understand and support supply chain sustainability. Performance measurement frameworks are useful tools that aid to collect and monitor the evolution of performance of any organization. However, there are few performance measurement frameworks developed in the literature for that purpose, all of them recently published, and lacking of a solid structure that aids to define and implement performance measurement elements in a way that provide an overall evaluation of the sustainability status of the supply chain. This paper introduces a novel performance measurement system to fill this research gap.

A Review of Factors Influencing Collaborative Relationships

Collaboration is a term commonly used to refer to a type of inter-organizational relationship. However, in real business assessments, many collaborative relationships fail due to the lack of understanding of the factors influencing collaboration sustainability. For this reason, enterprises, prior to engage to a collaborative relationship, need to understand further which the main factors influencing collaboration relationships are, how they are structured and how they interact so that decision makers that desire to engage in a collaborative relationship/network focus not only on improving performance indicators but also on the factors that influence the results of those performance indicators. The purpose of this paper is to present a critical literature review of factors influencing collaborative relationships in order to perform a comparative study of the works for identifying main strengths and gaps for future research.

A Review on Intellectual Capital Concepts as a Base for Measuring Intangible Assets of Collaborative Networks

This work presents a revision of the main definition and significances of the term Intellectual Capital, as it is an important issue of study. Once the main scientific works related to Intellectual Capital are presented and their main contributions highlighted, this work shows how it has been attempted to measure the Intellectual Capital at both individual enterprises and collaborative networks, as a source of meaningful information to make decisions. The paper evidences the lack of works that have successfully dealt with measuring Intellectual Capital at the collaborative networks level, highlighting the main barriers and what a proper measuring framework should address at this level.

Performance management in collaborative networks: difficulties and barriers

Global competitiveness obliges to enterprises to collaborate in many processes such as new product and services development in order to shorten the lifecycle, development and commercialization. Therefore, the competence has drifted from an individual focus to a supply chain management one and, from some years, to a collaborative enterprises network approach. It is common to find frameworks for measuring/managing the performance within extended enterprises, supply chains, virtual enterprises, etc. However, few authors deal with a higher level: the collaborative networks one. This concept of enterprises management set up bigger difficulties regarding not only from a conceptual and structural point of view but also considering both the design and posterior development of systems capable of managing the performance achieved in this type of organizations. This work describes both the main difficulties and barriers when trying to apply performance management concepts to collaborative networks. In this sense, it is highlighted the weaknesses of the existing intra-organizational frameworks that cannot be projected, as they are conceived, to manage performance within collaborative networks.

A Performance Measurement System to Manage CEN Operations, Evolution and Innovation

Nowadays, many enterprises collaborate forming a collaborative enterprise network in order to achieve competitive and sustainable advantages. These collaborative enterprise networks are operating many times under a glocal approach, which means that they have less time to react, to properly evolve and more challenges to face, mainly the fact of operate both locally (product design, sales) and globally (manufacturing, distribution). In this context, collaborative enterprise networks need to manage not only their classic operations (costs, quality, response, flexibility, etc) but they also need to integrally incorporate to their management and decision-making systems their collaborative practices regarding evolution and innovation. Then, this work presents an evolved performance measurement system to manage collaborative enterprise networks operations including co-innovation and co-evolution practices. Such a system has got four phases and, through the identification and quantification of relationships among performance elements, it offers a new management approach, which will provide collaborative enterprise network decision-makers with additional and meaningful information.

A Performance Management Framework for Managing Sustainable Collaborative Enterprise Networks

Many enterprises have difficulties to understand how sustainability can be managed. This scenario requires new tools that aid to define and collect the necessary information for managing the performance of the network and assuring its sustainability at the same time. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an integrated performance management framework that fills this research gap and aid to manage the sustainability of the enterprise network from its strategy into its operations in order to provide a tool for managing the sustainability performance more efficiently and effectively. The framework has been applied within a bathroom furniture supply chain.