Benchmarking operational efficiency in waste collection: Discussion of current approaches and possible alternatives

Efficiency assessment and benchmarking are crucial for managing any organization. However, especially from a regulatory perspective, such efficiency assessment and benchmarking must be unbiased from context-specific issues and should provide an absolute rating, rather than a relative one. The current work reviews the approaches used for performance assessment and benchmarking waste collection services, revealing that the majority are biased and are not absolute, and proposes two alternative context-unbiased and absolute performance indicators, the collection capacity use (CCU) and the segregated waste collection efficiency (SWE). The proposed indicators were calculated for 246 utilities operating in Portugal. The utilities were then ranked accordingly, and their position was compared with the position attained using the equivalent performance indicators in the system currently in use by the Portuguese service regulator. The results reveal ranking differences of over 50 positions and illustrate how misleading the results from context-biased and relative metrics can be.

The Impact of a BI-Supported Performance Measurement System on a Public Police Force

Performance measurement, as an effective tool for implementing organizational strategy and assisting ongoing control and surveillance, is broadly adopted today. The performance measurement system (PMS) explored in this case study was implemented, using business intelligence (BI) technologies, for a public police force. The system lets police commanders view and analyze the performance scores of their own units and get feedback on the success of their activities. The study examines the system's impact, through analysis of the metric results over a time period of five years. The results show that the vast majority of the metrics examined indeed improved. Further, the results underscore the moderation effect of relative metrics weights, as well as the different behavior of metrics that reflect activity versus those that reflect outcomes. The study underscores both the positive and the negative aspects of those results, and discusses their implications for future PMS implementation with BI technologies.

Labeling Water Transport Efficiencies

Pressurized Water Transport Systems (PWTSs) are responsible for a large percentage of the electricity consumption around the world, and current trends suggest that this proportion will continue to increase in the future. Controlling PWTS is therefore fundamental, including improving efficiency when necessary or compulsory. To achieve this, metrics to objectively assess the efficiency of the different losses and of the whole system are needed. These metrics, based on economic criteria, will be stricter if environmental costs are added to current water and energy costs. To assess different improvement strategies, some relative metrics, applied to both operational and structural losses, are considered. At the end, taking into account their relevance, these metrics are combined in a global energy score (IS), this being the main contribution of this paper. Finally, to focus on the concepts and methodology, a simple case study is presented.

Operationalizing Relative Customer Value

The construct of “value” has been central to explaining economic exchange since the time of Adam Smith. Despite its central importance, debate still exists as to what value entails. Absent a comprehensive understanding of value, researchers and managers have grappled with how to measure and manage value. Not surprisingly, absent a definition, no comprehensive, robust approach has emerged. We argue that value first must be viewed as a dual construct, i.e. value to the customer and value to the firm, that must be balanced to be sustainable. Given that value to the customer is clearly assessed as relative to competitive alternatives, we also argue that any robust measurement of value must account for competitive alternatives. We propose applying recent research on the use of relative metrics in linking to share of category spending as the foundation of assessing value to the customer (particularly since customers in most categories divide their spending across competing firms). This allows firms to assess the monetary value customers’ assign to their offerings, and to estimate changes in this value from different market actions. As value to the firm is ultimately about the net present value of customers’ economic contributions to the firm, this allows firms to balance value to the customer with value to the firm.

On several indices of bibliometry

The research productivity could be assessed both by absolute and relative metrics. The author explains the essence of the Hirsh index and demonstrates how it is calculated. The author refers to the Russian Citation Index database to demonstrate the personal bibliometric indices of the number of the well known in the library community authors, so one could compare his/her own evaluations with the bibliometric data. In conclusion, the bibliometry potential to evaluate large scale scientific trends is revealed.

An examination of relative satisfaction and share of wallet: investigating the impact of country and customer characteristics

Purpose Absolute satisfaction ratings are widely used, but demonstrate a poor link to share of wallet, in part because this relationship is mediated and/or moderated by customer characteristics (including total spend in the category) and heterogeneity of scale usage. Relative satisfaction metrics, such as the Wallet Allocation Rule, have been shown to produce a much stronger link to share of wallet than absolute monadic ratings. This study compares absolute and relative satisfaction models after controlling for these mediating and moderating factors and re-examines the impact of these factors when using relative, rather than absolute metrics. Design/methodology/approach 3,793 satisfaction ratings by 1,172 unique grocery customers across 5 countries (US, Brazil, Chile, France & Germany) are used to evaluate the mediating and moderating impacts of scale usage and customer characteristics on the relationship between satisfaction and share of wallet. Findings Relative metrics continue to significantly outperform absolute metrics after controlling for these factors. With the exception of the moderating influence of income, effects of customer characteristics and country differences are insignificant when linking relative satisfaction to share of wallet. Practical implications Managers need to re-evaluate their satisfaction measurement strategy in order to establish a strong link to actual behavior. While calculating relative satisfaction requires managers to collect data on competitors as well as the focal brand, this need for additional information is mitigated by a trade-off in terms of mediating and moderating information that is essential to properly model absolute metrics, but is not needed when using relative measures. Originality/value Provides a significant contribution to both retail literature and scientific literature in general by examining the robustness of a relative metrics approach within the grocery retail sector across a disparate collection of countries.

Relative measures in service research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce an alternative novel approach to measurement of customer perceptions of the service experience that links closely with customer loyalty outcomes. Design/methodology/approach – This conceptual paper draws upon prior theory and empirical research to investigate the relevance of using relative metrics compared to absolute metrics in service research. Findings – The findings upon which this paper draws upon show that measuring customer satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, brand preference using absolute metrics explain a very small per cent of the variance in key customer outcome measures such as share of wallet. Instead, a relative approach to these and other measures in service research is proposed. Practical implications – Although business practice has embraced relative measurement much more extensively than has scientific research, the vast majority of customer experience measurement programs today continue to employ absolute measures resulting in suboptimal allocation of firm resources. This paper is a call to rethink these current measurement practices. Originality/value – It is one of the first papers to argue for changing the widely employed use of absolute metrics in theory and practice in favor of relative metrics. Application to other service research theories is discussed.