Purpose – Literature and practice highlight the need to stimulate processes of qualitative growth in SMEs. The aim of the research presented in this paper is to identify a type of benchmarking and a benchmarking tool which can support the qualitative growth of these companies....

The attention focused on the complex set of human activities through which a company attempts to create value for its stakeholders is one of the most characteristic features of the total quality management (TQM) concept. This focalisation on the concept of process in the field of competitive...

The growing importance and considerable prestige that quality awards hold have encouraged firms to adopt “excellence models” as evaluation frameworks for organisational self‐assessment. This has contributed to the spread of a specific form of self‐assessment logic: primarily, the search...

Purpose – The aim of this study is to investigate both the path taken by companies in order to survive in a competitive environment and the factors that have favoured or limited their development. Design/methodology/approach – The study was carried out using a retrospective approach....

Purpose – A large amount of research deals with the identification of management practices related to new product development (NPD) success. To this purpose, assessment tools capable of helping enterprises to set up improvement processes are of extreme importance. The aim of this paper is to...

Do we really know the critical phenomena that are linked to how enterprises function and the dynamics of their relationships with customers, suppliers and competitors? Are their decision-making processes founded upon a set of performance measurements that were accurately designed and...

Managing processes with the aim of improving them necessarily requires both analysis and critical evaluation of organizational practice. This article takes up the theme of business process analysis with the aim of highlighting and comparing alternative techniques and approaches. Four approaches...

Examines the problems, and the limitations, of the use of process mapping techniques in the light of sociotechnical experience in systems analysis. To do this, first, the fundamental characteristics of the various process mapping techniques are illustrated, highlighting how these can be...

Few other managerial innovations have become popular as quickly as has business process reengineering (BPR); however, probably no other innovation has been interpreted in so many different ways either. This paper seeks to discover whether there is a conceptual core which both identifies and...