International performance benchmarking in winemaking

Benchmarking the practices of flexibility with maturity models and frameworks of organizational capabilities

Purpose

Organizational capabilities are crucial to achieve the objectives. A plethora of maturity models is available to guide organizational capabilities that create a perplexing situation about what stuff to improve and what to leave. Therefore, a unified maturity model addressing a wide range of capabilities is a necessity. This paper establishes that a flexibility maturity model is an unified model containing the operational, strategic and human capabilities.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper does a comparative analysis/benchmarking studies of different maturity models/frameworks widely used in the information technology (IT) sector with respect to the flexibility maturity model to establish its comprehensiveness and application in the organization to handle multiple goals.

Findings

This study confirms that the flexibility maturity model has the crucial elements of all the maturity models. If the organizations use the flexibility maturity model, they can avoid the burden of complying with multiple ones and become objective-driven rather than compliance-driven.

Research limitations/implications

The maturity models used in information technology sectors are used. This work will inspire other maturity models to adopt flexibility phenomena.

Practical implications

The comparative analysis will give confidence in application of flexibility framework. The business environment and strategic options across organizations are inherently different that the flexibility maturity model well handles.

Social implications

A choice is put to an organization to see the comparison tables produced in this paper and choose the right framework according to the prevailing business situation.

Originality/value

This is the first study that makes a conclusion based on comparative benchmarking of existing maturity models.

Public sector R&D and relative efficiency measurement of global comparators working on similar research streams

Purpose

Deriving a measure of efficiency of public-funded organizations (primarily not-for-profit organizations) and ranking these efficiency measures have been major subjects of debate and discussion. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relative performances of public-funded research and development (R&D) organizations functioning across multiple countries working on similar research streams. The authors use multiple measures of inputs and outputs for this purpose.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors use the data envelopment analysis (DEA) as the primary methodology of analysis The keywords highlighting the major research areas in the field of non-metrology, conducted by National Physical Laboratory (NPL), India, were utilized to select the global comparators working on similar research streams. These global comparators were three R&D organizations located in the USA and one each located in Germany and Japan. The relative efficiencies of the organizations were assessed with the following output variables – external cash flow, and the numbers of technologies transferred, publications and patents; and the following input variables – amount of grants received from the parent body, and the number of scientific personnel working in these public R&D organizations. The authors follow the output-oriented measure of efficiency at constant return to scale and variable return to scale, along with scale efficiencies.

Findings

The performance of NPL, India under multiple dimensions has been evaluated relative to its global comparators – the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan; the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA; Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Germany; the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, USA; and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA. The study indicates suggested measures and a set of targets to achieve the best possible performance for NPL and other R&D organizations. In most cases of efficient local but not so efficient global efficiency scores indicate that, on an average, the actual scale of production has diverged from the most productive scale size.

Research limitations/implications

The approach highlights the utilization of the DEA methodology for relative R&D performance assessment of global comparators. The discriminatory analysis has brought into sharp focus the dichotomy between local efficiency and global efficiency scores of these units and issues of scale size and regional disparities. The outcome of this approach is dependent upon correct selection of input and output variables and data availability.

Practical implications

The study results have profound implications for the management of public R&D institutions across nations working on similar-focused research streams, but functioning within different societal, economic, and political contexts.

Originality/value

The present work, being perhaps one of the few multinational studies of relative performance assessment of pubic-funded R&D organizations working on similar research streams, signifies the relevance of such an approach in the field of R&D/innovation management. This has opened up new avenues for further research in this area.