Development of an intelligent decision support system for benchmarking assessment of business partners

Abstract

In today’s competitive industrial environment, it is essential that companies are able to focus on their core activities and collaborate with business partners to achieve the common objective of meeting the best satisfaction of customer demands. However, selecting partners based on accumulated experience may not be effective due to subjective judgement and lack of systematic analysis. This paper attempts to propose a partners benchmarking assessment system (PBAS) which incorporates computational intelligence technologies into partners’ benchmarking process to support decision making. Evidence suggests that the undesirables occur in companies such as extensive delays in the planned schedule, serious quality problems and cost overruns are, to a certain extent, related to the unfulfilled promises of business partners. In this paper, the PBAS is designed to propose an alternative approach to benchmark the business partners based on case‐based reasoning and neural network. To validate the proposed system, a prototype has been developed and tested in an emulated industrial environment. The case example is outlined with analysis of the feasibility of this proposed system based on test results.

Designing a knowledge-based system for benchmarking: A DEA approach

“…Marti [37] proposes strategic knowledge benchmarking system (SKBS) to refine the classic strategic SWOT analysis. Lau et al [30] propose a partners benchmarking assessment system (PBAS) which incorporates computational intelligence technologies into partners' benchmarking process to support decision making. Naylor et al [42] describe the knowledge acquisition methodology and the knowledge management methodology adopted for the development of a knowledge-based system to estimate the cash cost performance of the product delivery process of steel plants.…”

“…Gunasekaran [20] suggests that IT can be used to develop a benchmarking tool, and IT-enabled benchmarking systems should provide immediate feedback and directly involve participants in the data collection process and ensure the quality and acceptance of study results. To date, a considerable number of researches have employed and combined the benchmarking concept and tool with the KBS studies, for example: [21,51,32,31,37,30,42].…”

“…By the 1990s, intelligent knowledge-based systems had been playing an important role in new decision support tools. Consequently, numerous studies about KBS with benchmarking have been done, such as [21,51,32,37,30,42]. But there have been few studies done about the combined the benchmarking tool, KBS and DEA technique.…”

Benchmarking of PR Function in Serbian Companies

“…The selection of the competent BP is a very important step in every benchmarking process. Much attention has been dedicated to this problem area in the literature, for example Razmi, et al (2000) and Lau, et al (2001). In general, it is aimed at selecting the BP which has the best characteristics and business results.…”

International Journal of Marketing Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, November 2009, all in one pdf file

“…Benchmarking experts suggest multi step approaches (Camp 1995, Camp, 1998, Spendolini 1992, Ncnair et al 1995. Lau et al (2001) has proposed an intelligent assessment system known as partner benchmarking assessment system which aimed for improving the current practice of partner selection, adopting the computational intelligence technologies. So the performance of the target benchmarked firm must be described.…”