Key Performance Indicator

Stephen Wood, David Holman and Christopher Stride are at the ESRC Centre for Organisation and Innovation and the Institute of Work Psychology, University of Sheffield. Using data from a sample of 145 U.K. call centres, the authors test the core propositions of the strategic human resource management (SHRM) approach that: (a) there are coherent links through the SHRM chain from strategy, through operational requirements, to work design and human resource management, and (b) the fit between the human resource practices and market factors determines organizational performance. Little support for these hypotheses is found as only (a) a few direct relationships between the elements of the SHRM chain are found, and (b) direct relationships, rather than ones moderated by market factors, are found between human resource practices and performance. But key operational requirements are linked to work design, which is itself related to a limited number of human resource practices. The direct effects of work design on key performance indicators are more pronounced than those of human resource practices.

Practitioners and researchers have turned their attention toward collaborative arrangements and new Collaborative Project Delivery Models (CPDMs). In this paper we present findings from a study focusing on the impact of a project alliance on project performance, as an example of a CPDM compared to traditional project practice. Findings are based on a case study where empirical data has been collected by carrying out semi-structured interviews with thirteen professionals within the Norwegian oil and gas industry. A main finding is that a project alliance contributes to better project performance by promoting a better working relationship between the partners compared to traditional projects. This result is achieved through closer cooperation, shorter decision paths, transparent partners, and an overall alliance culture tailored around collaboration. It is challenging to discover areas where the investigated project alliance has not been performing as expected, or has performed worse than traditional projects. Findings also show some barriers related to the co-location and the interfaces between the companies, the project alliance, and the partner organizations. Conclusions drawn should be of interest to both researchers and practitioners contemplating to shift from a traditional project practice to a more collaborative one.

Cite as: Nevstad, K., Karlsen, A. S. T., Aarseth, W. K., & Andersen, B. (2022). How a project alliance influences project performance compared to traditional project practice–Findings from a case study in the Norwegian oil and gas industry. The Journal of Modern Project Management, 9(3).

A multi-stakeholder group including land managers, policy agencies and biophysical scientists was establishedto oversee a catchment scale project examining the economic and environmental performance of a representative North Island hill country catchment (296 ha Mangaotama catchment, Whatawhata) in the western Waikato region of New Zealand. The group first identified goals relevant to achieving a "well managed rural hill catchment", including viable businesses, healthy ecosystems, protected landscape values, active partnerships, demonstrable environmental performance, and adequate rural services and infrastructure. The current state of the case study catchment was characterised

Over the course of the past three decades, facilities management has become the subject of an increasing number of research and development efforts. The main objective of the present research was to examine the efficiency of maintenance under alternative maintenance policies and different sources of human resources. The research focused on the maintenance of public hospital buildings in Israel, with the objective of providing a model for multi-system facilities operating in a dynamic environment. This paper describes the last three stages of the research: the establishment of key performance indicators, the implementation of these indicators in a case study in order to appraise them, and the validation of the indicators. Four key performance indicators were developed, as follows: the Building Performance Indicator (BPI), the Manpower Sources Diagram (MSD), the Maintenance Efficiency Indicator (MEI) and the Managerial Span of Control (MSC). This paper illustrates a case study in which the four developed indicators were implemented in practice. Characteristics of the case study hospital are presented and analysed. Finally, the conclusions and recommendations drawn from the analysis of the hospital case study are discussed, validated and deliberated upon. The approach presented in this paper integrates performance, financial, human resources and organizational aspects to facilitate an improved evaluation method of the parameters affecting the execution of maintenance activities.

The performance of hospital buildings depends to a large degree on the efficiency of maintenance execution. The research objectives were to examine the efficiency of maintenance under alternative maintenance policies and alternative sources of labour (outsourcing vs. in-house). The research focused on main-tenance of hospital buildings as a model for multi-system buildings operating in dynamic environments. The research used a systematic field survey followed by an in-depth statistical analysis. Four key performance indicators (KPIs) were developed. The first, the building performance indicator (BPI), indicates the physical-functional condition of buildings. The second, the manpower sources diagram (MSD), reflects the efficiency of using in-house labour vs. the outsourcing of labour. The third, the maintenance efficiency indicator (MEI), is based on the annual costs of maintenance, the building age coefficient and the building occupancy coefficient. This indicator reflects the efficiency of usage of the resources (labour, outsourcing, materials and spare parts) in maintenance. The fourth indicator deals with the organizational structure of the maintenance division. The proposed KPIs integrate four aspects of hospital facilities management: performance management, composition of labour, efficiency of main-tenance operations and organizational effectiveness. Efficient execution of maintenance management of hospital buildings may be obtained by the simultaneous implementation of the aforementioned KPIs. The proposed indicators may be adapted to other types of facilities, such as office buildings, industrial plants and infrastructure.

High-quality of products is a critical issue for manufacturers to maintain their competitiveness in global markets. For this reason, more attention has been paid by operations managers and academics to the design of quality assurance strategies, acceptance sampling plans and inspection allocation problems. In the last decades, international research has studied and introduced several models and approaches to investigate these issues. The purpose of this paper is to provide a new methodology for designing and selecting correct integrated quality assurance strategies, defining cost models for acceptance policies and inspection station configurations. Generally, high-quality of items is guaranteed by avoiding defects, mainly caused by non-conforming components, resulting from instantaneous and standard infant mortality. Thus, an optimal acceptance policy is defined in order to reduce the instantaneous infant mortality defects. A closed-form equation has been introduced to determine eas...

In 2008, telecommunication market trends in Africa reported 0.2% penetration for broadband wireless access (BWA) technologies. IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) is recognized as a promising technology to provide BWA for heterogeneous traffic. Among the various features defined in the standard, some features such as the scheduling algorithm is undefined. A new MDRR-based (Modified Deficit Round Robin) scheduling algorithm is proposed in this paper to maintain QoS requirements among heterogeneous traffic. The performance of the enhanced MDRR-based algorithm is compared to the existing MDRR algorithm in terms of throughput in an evenly-distributed and mixed traffic scenario. Maximum throughput of 68 kbps and 112 kbps were attained by the 20% and 40 % latency MDRR-based algorithm respectively while only 56 kbps was achieved by the MDRR algorithm.

This paper asks whether doctoral assessment has escaped the regulation of quality assurance procedures. Raising questions about the affective and micropolitical dimensions of an oral examination conducted in private, it explores how current concerns about quality assurance, standards, benchmarks and performance indicators in higher education apply to the assessment of doctoral/research degrees in Britain, and in particular to the viva voce examination. Successful PhD completion is a key performance indicator for universities and an important basis for the accreditation of their staff. Despite the rise of new managerialism, a general preoccupation with calculable standards and outcomes and an emphasis on student entitlements, transparency of decision making and information for 'consumers', there still seems to be considerable variation, and some mystification, in how doctoral assessment is conducted and experienced. The massification of doctoral studies and the doubling in number of institutions awarding their own doctorates, post-1992, are both likely to increase product variety still further. In the last decade of the twentieth century, there was a major expansion of doctoral studies and a widening of the types of doctorate that may be undertaken in the UK. Although attention has been given to improving supervision and research skills training here since the late 1980s, the assessment process seems to have escaped the scrutiny, checks and balances currently being applied to other academic programmes. In this paper we wish to explore if and how quality assurance, standards, benchmarks and performance indicators should apply in particular to the viva voce examination. We shall also consider the emotional, affective and micropolitical dimensions of an oral examination conducted in private.

The burgeoning commitment to contracting the delivery of bus services through competitive tendering or negotiated performance-based contracts has been accompanied by as many contract payments schemes as there are contracts. We are now well placed to design a simplified performance-linked payment (SPLP) model that can be used as a reference point to ensure value for money, given the accumulation of experiences throughout the world which have revealed substantive common elements in contracts. Whether the payment to the operator is framed as a payment per passenger or as a payment per service kilometre, the SPLP identifies efficient subsidy outcomes that are linked to a proxy indicator of net social benefit per dollar of subsidy. We illustrate how the SPLP model can be applied to obtain the gross (subsidy) cost per passenger (or per passenger km) from measures of gross cost efficiency and network effectiveness. This model can then be used as part of a benchmarking activity to identify reference value of money prospects in respect of passengers per $ subsidy outlay by adjusting for influences not under the control of the service provider. A single framework to identify contract payments to operators, and to assess (i.e., benchmark) operator performance on critical KPIs, is provided by internalising critical key performance indicators (KPIs) in the design of the SPLP. The proposed SPLP model is sufficiently general to be independent of the procurement method (competitive tendered or negotiated, for example) and of the treatment of revenue allocation (net or gross based contracts), with the additional advantage of being able to assess value for money for government.

The management of semantic multidimensional data models plays an important role during the phases of development and maintenance of data warehouse systems. Unfortunately, this is not done with the necessary stress by now. Reasons might be seen in the plethora of semantic notations or the insufficient tool support for multidimensional modeling. The paper on hand provides experiences gained within a project with an industry partner of the telecommunications industry. Their problem is a very huge data warehouse with more than 400 data cubes and several hundred key performance indicators. We developed a repository-based solution for managing the semantic data models. Our lessons learned show that especially for very large data models there has to be a repository based solution as well as a clear concept on how to break them up into their component pars. The aim of our principles is to increase the understandability as well as the maintainability of semantic multidimensional data models.

Organizations are measured in different ways. In specific terms, organizations that are managed through business processes use KPI's as measuring elements. However, it is uncommon for companies to use data yielded by information systems to improve or monitor the indicators suggested by the organization's reality. This paper presents a proposal to guide the improvement of processes on the basis of data mining, which can be performed with amounts of information that organizations consider relevant throughout time. To this end, the literature that supports the foundation and measurement of processes, as well as data mining applied to information management in processes is initially reviewed. Then, data mining is described in the context of information management that improves processes. Finally, the proposal is validated through a case study, which yields applicable results. From this paper, it can be inferred that data mining applied to amounts of data that support processes in certain periods of time can improve their management, as well as the efficient achievement of organizational goals.

Purpose: The question of resource scarcity and emerging pressure of environmental legislations has brought a new challenge for the manufacturing industry. On the one hand, there is a huge population that demands a large quantity of commodities; on the other hand, these demands have to be met by minimum resources and pollution. Resource conservative manufacturing (ResCoM) is a proposed holistic concept to manage these challenges. The successful implementation of this concept requires cross functional collaboration among relevant fields, and among them, closed loop supply chain is an essential domain. The paper aims to highlight some misconceptions concerning the closed loop supply chain, to discuss different challenges, and in addition, to show how the proposed concept deals with those challenges through analysis of key performance indicators (KPI). The work presented in this paper is mainly based on the literature review. The analysis of performance of the closed loop supply chain is done using system dynamics, and the Stella software has been used to do the simulation. The results of the simulation depict that in ResCoM; the performance of the closed loop supply chain is much enhanced in terms of supply, demand, and other uncertainties involved. The results may particularly be interesting for industries involved in remanufacturing, researchers in the field of closed loop supply chain, and other relevant areas. Originality: The paper presented a novel research concept called ResCoM which is supported by system dynamics models of the closed loop supply chain to demonstrate the behavior of KPI in the closed loop supply chain.

Transformation of energy supply systems into green intensifies the use of renewable energy sources. Renewables cannot continuously supply energy. Therefore, energy storage systems are very important in the whole system of generation and distribution. Anyway, energy storage systems have many issues in terms of sustainability. This paper classified energy storage and analyzed issues in their sustainability solutions. In addition, it determines the key performance indicators that define the sustainability of energy storage systems. This analysis determined many sustainability problems presented by the information for each key performance indicator. The least negative impact is shown for the performance of mechanical energy storage and sensible/latent heat storage. The production of green hydrogen, green ammonia and biogas showed some negative impact. The worst sustainability is related to energy storage technologies or electrochemical energy storage technologies.

A data warehouse is designed to consolidate and maintain all attributes that are relevant for the analysis processes. Due to the rapid increase in the size of the modern operational systems, it becomes neither practical, nor necessary to load and maintain in the data warehouse every operational attribute. This paper presents a novel methodology for automated selection of the most relevant independent attributes in a data warehouse. The method is based on the information-theoretic approach to knowledge discovery in databases. Attributes are selected by a stepwise forward procedure aimed at minimizing the uncertainty in the values of key performance indicators (KPI's). Each selected attribute is assigned a score, expressing its degree of relevance. Using the method does not require any prior expertise in the domain of the data and it can be equally applied to nominal and ordinal attributes. An attribute will be included in a data warehouse schema, if it is found as relevant to at least one KPI. We demonstrate the applicability of the method by reducing the dimensionality of a direct marketing database.

Introduction. Within primary health care policy, there is an increasing focus on enhancing involvement with secondary health care, social care services and communities. Yet, translating these expectations into tangible changes frequently encounters significant obstacles. As part of an investigation into the progress made in achieving primary health care reform in Aotearoa New Zealand, realist research was undertaken with those charged with responsibility for national and local policies. The specific analysis in this paper probes primary health care leaders' assessments of progress towards more collaboration with other health and non-health agencies, and communities. Aim. This study aimed to investigate how ideas for more integration and joinedup care have found their way into the practice of primary health care in Aotearoa New Zealand. Methods. Applying a realist logic of inquiry, data from semi-structured interviews with primary health care leaders were analysed to identify key contextual characteristics and mechanisms. Explanations were developed of what influenced leaders to invest energy in joined-up and integrated care activities. Results. Our findings highlight three explanatory mechanisms and their associated contexts: a willingness to share power, build trusting relationships and manage task complexity. These underpin leaders' accounts of the success (or otherwise) of collaborative arrangements. Discussion. Such insights have import in the context of the current health reforms for stakeholders charged with developing local approaches to the planning and delivery of health services.

Fourth Generation wireless technologies depend on the performance of their schedulers to deliver high data throughput and meet quality-of-service commitments. We compare four schedulers for mobile WiMAX using five industry-defined key performance indicators: sector and application throughput, completion time, fairness index and delay. The selected scheduling algorithms are: Proportional Fairness (PF), Modified Largest Weighted Delay First (MLWDF), Highest Urgency First (HUF), and Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ). Three simulated environments are used: controlled, stationary and mobile. The controlled environment provides insights into the time-related behavior of flows with identical QoS parameters and different RF conditions. Results for the stationary and mobile environments show that algorithms meet QoS requirements within system capacity. Opportunistic algorithms (PF and MLWDF) achieve considerable throughput improvements. MLWDF's throughput results, while better under stationary conditions, fall behind PF in the mobile scenario. No statistically significant differences are observed in the mobile environment for application completion time and fairness. v

Summary New Zealand's housing stock is well known for being cold, damp and resource inefficient. Beacon Pathway Limited aims to drive change in the New Zealand housing sector to see a significant improvement in the sustainability of our housing stock. In particular Beacon's focus is on "ordinary" homes and occupants - rather than the top 5% niche normally the subject of eco home and high sustainability aspiration. In order to achieve this Beacon has developed two NOW Homes ® and nine NOW Home ® Renovations - houses built and renovated for an average budget for ordinary families which perform significantly better than the vast majority of New Zealand houses. These homes have been monitored in terms of their resource use, quality of the indoor environment and overall sustainability against key performance indicators and benchmarks set by Beacon. The homes have now demonstrated that development and retrofitting of these homes with current technology and for prices w...

A key aspect in any process-oriented organisation is the evaluation of process performance for the achievement of its strategic and operational goals. Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) are a key asset to carry out this evaluation, and, therefore, having an appropriate definition of these PPIs is crucial. After a careful review of the literature related and a study of the current picture in different real organisations, we conclude that there not exists any proposal that allows to define PPIs in a way that is unambiguous and highly expressive, understandable by technical and non-technical users and traceable with the business process (BP). Furthermore, it is also increasingly important to provide these PPI definitions with support to automated analysis allowing to extract implicit information from them and their relationships with the BP. In this work we present PPINOT, a tool that allows the graphical definition of PPIs together with their corresponding business processes, and their subsequent automated analysis.

This paper addresses the problem of run-time management of a service centre energy efficiency by using a context aware self-adapting algorithm. The algorithm considers the service centre current context situation and predefined Green/Key Performance Indicators (GPI/KPI) to adapt and optimize the service centre energy consumption to the incoming workload. The service centre energy performance context situation is obtained by collecting service centre current context data related to the business applications scheduled to run on service centre resources, service centre IT computing resources and the service centre facilities. A reinforcement learning approach is used to decide the best sequence of actions to be executed to bring the service centre resources as close as possible to a GPI and KPI compliant state while minimizing the energy consumption.

Facility Management (FM) has evolved into a strategic discipline central to the sustainability, efficiency, and lifecycle performance of built assets. At the core of effective FM is the establishment of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that measure outcomes across contractors and consultants involved in facility-related projects. While contractors are traditionally evaluated on executional outcomes such as timeliness, cost control, and service-level compliance, consultants are assessed on their advisory capacity, design alignment, and compliance with strategic and regulatory goals. However, the lack of an integrated performance measurement framework often leads to fragmented assessments that obscure overall value creation. This paper examines the theoretical and practical dimensions of KPI frameworks in FM and consultation contracting, reviews international best practices, and proposes a structured, integrated framework that aligns measurement mechanisms with sustainability, lifecycle value, and digital transformation.

A diferencia de la contaminación accidental, el fraude y la defensa alimentaria se centran en actos maliciosos que buscan tanto el beneficio económico como el daño deliberado. Los actuales estándares de seguridad alimentaria exigen a las empresas certificadas que implementen medidas para prevenir y reducir la posibilidad de sufrir fraude que puedan afectar a los productos fabricados o manipulados en sus instalaciones, así como medidas concretas en caso de que esto ocurra.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is two‐fold. First, is to apply the benchmarking approach to the dates export supply chain (DESC) in Oman and Tunisia (taking Tunisia as a benchmark) to identify gaps in the organizational and operational structures of the DESC in the two countries. Second, is to utilize the information generated to put forward recommendations to improve Omani DESC.Design/methodology/approachFour benchmarking dimensions are developed, each dimension with a number of key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPIs are then used in the benchmarking exercise.FindingsResults show that Tunisia is performing better than Oman in all the four dimensions.Originality/valueThe study enables the readers and the stakeholders to gain some valuable insights in the subject matter. A careful analysis of the findings should enable Oman policy makers and stakeholders to produce an industry action plan to correct the gaps and take the lead.

Information Technology governance (ITG) which was a relatively new concept in the late 1990s, has gained importance in the 21st century due to factors namely the collapse of Enron Inc, and the need for a better reporting and financial disclosure system as requested by the US Securities and Exchange Commission chairman in 2001. Subsequent legislations namely the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) in the United States and the Turnbull Guidance in the United Kingdom provided further impetus for the need for ITG. Other factors that prompt companies to give more importance to the management, control and measurement of information systems include the risk associated with information, the investments made by companies into the IT resource and the need to be competitive in the marketplace. All of these factors emphasize the requirement to measure the performance or effectiveness of information systems. The state of performance of various entities, events and process of information systems give a 'dashboard approach' vision to management. In this paper a metrics generation model is proposed for generating metrics that can measure the key performance indicators and goals of the control objectives of CoBIT by applying the GQM model..

Inefficiency of road freight transport is one of the primary factors that hamper the economy of sub-Saharan Africa. Long delays experienced at border posts are the single biggest contributor towards the slow average movement of freight. Cross-border operations are complicated by the conflicting security objectives of customs authorities versus efficiency objectives of transport operators. It furthermore suffers from illegal practices involving truck drivers and customs officials. In theory the efficiency of cross-border operations can be improved based on the availability of more accurate and complete informationthe latter will be possible if different stakeholders can exchange data between currently isolated systems. This paper firstly quantifies the size of the problem and estimates the potential economic benefits that will be created by improved cross-border operations. It then proposes a combined GPS/RFID system that can provide the required level of visibility to support improved operational management, resulting in a simultaneous increase in the security and efficiency of cross-border freight operations. A brief cost-benefits analysis is performed to show that the expected benefits from such a system will by far exceed the costs of implementation.

We develop flow-level models of TCP/IP networks. We first consider access network models in a very general framework where Internet subscribers can use several types of TCP-based applications and may have limited peak rates. Using multiclass networks of Generalized Processor Sharing queues (in the sense of Cohen), we derive key performance indicators in closed-form. We then give arguments in favor of a weighted max-min fair (WMM) allocation, with flow weights depending both on the number of TCP connections and on the RTT of the flow, as an approximation of TCP bandwidth-sharing. Finally, we build upon the models developed for access networks to propose an approximate model for the global network, assuming WMM fairness as bandwidth-sharing paradigm. This global network model allows to account for backbone congestion by replacing access links by virtual links whose capacities are computed in order to reflect the probability of congestion on flow path.

Nowadays, Improving decision-making to define a group of strategic objectives and associated Performance Indicators (KPIs) are has become one of the critical issues for practices relating to scope management gaining competitive advantages. Approach: This study focus on validate KPI supporting decision-making for sustainability appraisal in projects management for Malaysian Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) enterprises in China. Results: First, it need to identify key issues related to sustainable intelligent buildings (AEC factors) and determines the performance level of their projects in China. Second, test critically decisionmakers perceptions and values of selected KPIs intelligent buildings to supporting decision-making processes. Third to develop a conceptual model for the selection of the appropriate KPIs for measuring the level of sustainability for sustainable intelligent buildings, this provides information as to whether practices could be adopted by Malaysian AEC enterprises in China to achieve objectives. Conclusion: This study established KPIs-SDM practices that are significantly correlated with the projects handled by Malaysian enterprises in China. It investigated and compare 19 KPIs-SDM relational factors for Malaysian AEC project adopted in China.

To ensure their competitive advantage an increasing number of organizations adopt business process management for design, automation, and analysis of their business processes. In order to reduce cost, improve quality, save time, and increase flexibility, techniques for business process improvement and re-engineering are applied. Improving the environmental impact of a business process is a new challenge organizations are faced with. However, current approaches and techniques for business process optimization do not cover the ecological dimension explicitly. In this paper, we propose patterns which describe good solutions for green business process design to address this gap from a business perspective. The patterns are described independently from concrete business process modeling languages and execution environments in order to provide a broad applicability of the patterns within different scenarios. In addition to the patterns, we discuss the general usability of the patterns bas...

Fourth Generation wireless technologies depend on the performance of their schedulers to deliver high data throughput and meet quality-of-service commitments. We compare four schedulers for mobile WiMAX using five industry-defined key performance indicators: sector and application throughput, completion time, fairness index and delay. The selected scheduling algorithms are: Proportional Fairness (PF), Modified Largest Weighted Delay First (MLWDF), Highest Urgency First (HUF), and Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ). Three simulated environments are used: controlled, stationary and mobile. The controlled environment provides insights into the time-related behavior of flows with identical QoS parameters and different RF conditions. Results for the stationary and mobile environments show that algorithms meet QoS requirements within system capacity. Opportunistic algorithms (PF and MLWDF) achieve considerable throughput improvements. MLWDF's throughput results, while better under stationary conditions, fall behind PF in the mobile scenario. No statistically significant differences are observed in the mobile environment for application completion time and fairness. v

Mining remains one of the most hazardous industries, exposing workers to risks such as rockfalls, toxic gases, and heavy machinery accidents. Robotics and automation are transforming the sector by enhancing safety and operational efficiency. Automated systems—such as autonomous haul trucks, robotic drilling rigs, and AI-driven maintenance—reduce human exposure to dangerous environments, improve precision, and enable continuous operations. Case studies, including Rio Tinto’s autonomous haulage in Australia and Resolute Mining’s fully automated Syama gold mine in Mali, demonstrate tangible benefits such as zero injury incidents, cost reductions of up to 30%, and increased equipment utilization. These technologies deliver optimized performance, lower operational costs, and improved resource recovery, while creating safer working conditions. However, challenges remain, including high capital investment requirements, regulatory gaps, and the need for robust safety protocols. Future trends point to greater integration of AI, IoT, and human–robot collaboration, expanding automation beyond haulage and drilling into areas like blasting, tunneling, and inspection. Ultimately, the strategic adoption of robotics and automation can make mining operations safer, more efficient, and more sustainable.

The application of automated systems can make an im portant contribution towards increasing the efficiency and sustainabilit y of large and small mining operations. Automation can improve the quality of w ork for employees by reducing exposure to unhealthy or unsafe environmen ts, and its introduction into mining operations provides opportunities for traini ng and capacity-building. Autonomous haul trucks ensure consistent driving co nditions (smoother braking and accelerating) reducing fuel consumption which r esults in significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions. Furthermo re, vehicle maintenance is more predictable and better-controlled. Automated s ystems increase productivity and efficiency, thereby making projects more econom ically feasible. Timing and social issues are major considerations when impleme nting automated systems. Understanding the social, environmental and economi c issues surrounding automation and its contributions to the extractive industry prepares...

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is two‐fold. First, is to apply the benchmarking approach to the dates export supply chain (DESC) in Oman and Tunisia (taking Tunisia as a benchmark) to identify gaps in the organizational and operational structures of the DESC in the two countries. Second, is to utilize the information generated to put forward recommendations to improve Omani DESC.Design/methodology/approachFour benchmarking dimensions are developed, each dimension with a number of key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPIs are then used in the benchmarking exercise.FindingsResults show that Tunisia is performing better than Oman in all the four dimensions.Originality/valueThe study enables the readers and the stakeholders to gain some valuable insights in the subject matter. A careful analysis of the findings should enable Oman policy makers and stakeholders to produce an industry action plan to correct the gaps and take the lead.