Raúl Rodríguez-Rodríguez

Foundations for collaborative performance measurement

In the past years, companies have been establishing collaboration relationships as a means to become more competitive. This type of relationship presents some special characteristics that need to be managed properly in order to be successful. Performance measurement systems (PMSs) may support the management of such relationships by aiding to define and collect the necessary information. However, further understanding is needed to identify the elements and interactions among collaborative elements and how they can be integrated within a PMS. The aim of this article is twofold. The first purpose is to analyse the contents of works that tackle interorganisational and collaborative relationships as well as PMSs for interorganisational and collaborative environments by defining a typology. The typology comprises two dimensions: degree of relationships among collaboration elements and integration of collaboration within PMS. The second purpose is to perform a comparative study of the works for identifying main strengths and gaps for future research.

Business process interoperability and collaborative performance measurement

In the recent years, inter-organisational cooperation has been one of the organisational strategies most used to compete and become adapted to the exigencies of the global market. In this context, internal business processes of the cooperative enterprises should interact to pursue common objectives that will be profitable for all parts. Therefore, it is necessary to measure the performance of these business processes under a strategic approach and in a twofold manner, from a global perspective (inter-enterprise) and from an individual or partial perspective (intra-enterprise). Performance measurement systems (PMSs) described in the literature that discuss this context are very different in their conception and broadness. This paper describes the basic characteristics that PMSs should fulfil to cover interoperability requirements and a literature review of the PMSs that deal with business process interoperability in order to gain detailed insight into PMS definition for these contexts. From the literature review, a comparison of the PMSs is obtained with regard to eight core characteristics for these contexts: business process representation, business process measurement, business process lifecycle management, PMS intra and interorganisational levels measurement, process-decomposition approach, intra-inter-process connection measurement, interorganisational coordination measurement, and common interorganisational strategy.

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.

An Approach to Select Suppliers for Sustainable Collaborative Networks

Supplier selection is an important decision-making process within supply chain management that involves qualitative and quantitative factors. This process is even more complex if different partners that are already collaborating desire to choose a partner for enhancing the sustainability of their collaborative network. Sustainability literature supports the need to consider three main types of sustainability factors: environmental, social, and economic factors. In addition, the management of collaborative networks is better done using a performance management framework/system that allows managing performance under various performance perspectives or dimensions in a structured manner. This paper proposes a novel approach to select suppliers for sustainable collaborative networks using a performance management framework. With this approach, enterprises that are collaborating (or desire to do it) will have a tool to select suppliers aligned with their strategy and the sustainability of their collaborative network, and therefore, improving the supplier selection process and their competitiveness.

A collaborative scheduling GA for products-packages service within extended selling chains environment

The theory of network coordination provides theoretical foundations to explain how companies can overcome organizational boundaries and constraints to jointly manage business processes across their selling chains. In particular, this work focuses on Collaborative Scheduling, a collaboration process whereby selling chain trading partners activate either on-line or off-line inter-firm coordination mechanisms to jointly plan production activities in order to deliver the final products to end customers each one of them, being the delivery date as close to the date desired as possible. The problem of collaborative scheduling is formally defined by means of a mathematical model. In the model, the defined objective function has the goal to minimize the total weighted tardiness of the package of products acquired by the clients to be delivered in a specific date. The delivery date of each Product-Package is conditioned by the latest date established by each supplier for each product that forms part of the same one. Besides, having different process times for each product and different penalties for each Product-Package, each supplier can offer a different mix of additional products with different due date. Due to the complexity of the problem a Genetic Algorithm has been the approach taken for its resolution. The GA elements and procedures are defined and the parameters are tuned. Although the major contribution of this work focuses on the algorithmic development of a proposal in the context of operations research that could help to solve the problem also is discussed the environment in which this occurs and that justifies our interest. In order to validate the proposed solutions diverse configurations are presented and the results obtained by means of the GA and some heuristics rules are compared.

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.