Benchmarking contract management process maturity: a case study of the US Navy

Public procurement and competitiveness of women-owned businesses: a structural equation model (SEM) for gender-responsive procurement in Uganda

Purpose

Several intergovernmental organizations claim that the involvement of women in public procurement has a direct impact on sustainable development and growth, especially in the developing world, yet we know very little of such claim. This study aims to empirically examine how public procurement can contribute to women empowerment by boosting the competitiveness of women-owned businesses (WOBs) in Uganda.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study, a cross-sectional survey method is used. Quantitative data were gathered from a sample of 371 respondents in Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and a section of women entrepreneurs in Uganda's capital Kampala. From the literature review, six hypotheses were formulated and tested using structural equation modelling (SEM). A research model is developed and presented.

Findings

All hypotheses, except for one, were supported. Procurement policy had a significant influence on evaluation criteria, contract management and most importantly, on the competitiveness of WOBs. Within the procurement process, evaluation criteria had a significant influence on the competitiveness of WOBs, while the influence of contract management on competitiveness of WOBs was not statistically significant. We, therefore, concluded that public procurement can indeed enhance women empowerment through a gender-responsive procurement policy. Above all, pre-contract award interventions such as streamlining evaluation criteria to ease access of WOBs to public procurement contracts seem have the most significant impact to competitiveness of WOBs compared to post-ward interventions during contract management.

Originality/value

This study offers a research-based model that articulates the role of procurement policy as an enabler for competitiveness of WOBs in developing countries. The model proposes a combination of both policy (a direct influence) and interventions in the supplier selection process (an indirect influence) to boost the competitiveness of WOBs.

A corporate sustainability maturity model for readiness assessment: a three-step development strategy

Purpose

One of the main challenges of organisations today is how to navigate their development into ideal sustainable organisations. However, each readiness level requires a different rubric of indicators. Therefore, this study develops a corporate sustainability maturity model (CSMM), which can be used by organisations to conduct self-assessments, identify their current sustainability maturity levels and transition into mature sustainable organisations.

Design/methodology/approach

This CSMM comprises various maturity domains, sub-domains and levels as well as a rubric of indicators for assessing the maturity of corporate sustainability. In its development, a systematic literature review examined existing maturity models, after which a pilot study, based on the literature review, content analysis and expert interviews, was used to create a prototype of the CSSM. Finally, the model was refined and expanded by considering practitioners' feedback and the tendencies of other sustainability maturity models.

Findings

On the basis of the findings, some Indonesian organisations conducted sustainability activities, without having a strategic plan. Moreover, the factors driving organisations to conduct sustainability efforts included external and internal pressure. However, typical factors, such as awareness of sustainability and organisational reputation gained from conducting sustainability activities, were insignificant in the sample.

Originality/value

This CSMM is the first sustainability maturity model developed for readiness assessment in an Indonesian context. Through this CSMM, organisations can determine their current readiness level of sustainability maturity and choose the correct indicators to help improve each sustainability domain in the matrix.

Semantic key phrase-based model for document management

Purpose

Document management is growing in importance proportionate to the growth of unstructured data, and its applications are increasing from process benchmarking to customer relationship management and so on. The purpose of this paper is to improve important components of document management that is keyword extraction and document clustering. It is achieved through knowledge extraction by updating the phrase document matrix. The objective is to manage documents by extending the phrase document matrix and achieve refined clusters. The study achieves consistency in cluster quality in spite of the increasing size of data set. Domain independence of the proposed method is tested and compared with other methods.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, a synset-based phrase document matrix construction method is proposed where semantically similar phrases are grouped to reduce the dimension curse. When a large collection of documents is to be processed, it includes some documents that are very much related to the topic of interest known as model documents and also the documents that deviate from the topic of interest. These non-relevant documents may affect the cluster quality. The first step in knowledge extraction from the unstructured textual data is converting it into structured form either as term frequency-inverse document frequency matrix or as phrase document matrix. Once in structured form, a range of mining algorithms from classification to clustering can be applied.

Findings

In the enhanced approach, the model documents are used to extract key phrases with synset groups, whereas the other documents participate in the construction of the feature matrix. It gives a better feature vector representation and improved cluster quality.

Research limitations/implications

Various applications that require managing of unstructured documents can use this approach by specifically incorporating the domain knowledge with a thesaurus.

Practical implications

Experiment pertaining to the academic domain is presented that categorizes research papers according to the context and topic, and this will help academicians to organize and build knowledge in a better way. The grouping and feature extraction for resume data can facilitate the candidate selection process.

Social implications

Applications like knowledge management, clustering of search engine results, different recommender systems like hotel recommender, task recommender, and so on, will benefit from this study. Hence, the study contributes to improving document management in business domains or areas of interest of its users from various strata’s of society.

Originality/value

The study proposed an improvement to document management approach that can be applied in various domains. The efficacy of the proposed approach and its enhancement is validated on three different data sets of well-articulated documents from data sets such as biography, resume and research papers. These results can be used for benchmarking further work carried out in these areas.

An analysis of a structured benchmarking project

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a benchmarking project carried out by the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) as part of a structured benchmarking initiative. The project was based on the TRADE benchmarking methodology and this paper examines the tools, activities and outcomes that relate to each stage of the adopted methodology.

Design/methodology/approach

This study is based on case study methodology. Data were collected from various sources including analysis of project reports written by DEWA’s benchmarking team reporting on their activities during the project. Data were also collected from four project presentations given at different stages of the project. In addition, the research team held three meetings with the DEWA benchmarking team at different stages of the benchmarking project.

Findings

The results show the key challenges and successes faced during each stage of the benchmarking project. It indicates the actions taken to overcome the challenges and the role played by internal and external stakeholders in facilitating the success of the benchmarking project.

Practical implications

The study presents information that would guide organisations that wish to carry out a benchmarking project – and particularly those implementing benchmarking for the first time. The study provides a summary of the key lessons learnt by DEWA’s benchmarking team as a guide for other organisations.

Originality/value

Academic research has not adequately examined and analysed the stage-by-stage elements of a benchmarking project from the perspective of the implementing organisation. This study addresses this gap by detailing and analysing the experiences of a benchmarking project by tracking the stage-by-stage activities of the benchmarking team.