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This study aims to develop benchmarks of the financial performance of contractors and a decision support tool for evaluation, selection and appointment of contractors. The financial benchmarks allow contractors to know where they are relative to the best-performing contractors, and they can then take steps to improve their own performance. The decision support tool helps clients to decide which contractor should be awarded the project.

Financial data between 2013 and 2015 of 44 Singapore-based contractors were acquired from a Singaporean public agency. Benchmarks for Z-score and financial ratios were developed. A decision tree for evaluating contractors was constructed.

This study found that between 57% and 64% of contractors stayed in the financially healthy zone from 2013 to 2015. Ratios related to financial liabilities are relatively bad compared with international standards.

The limitation is that the data is obtained from a cross-sectional survey of contractors’ financial performance in Singapore over a three-year period. Regarding the finding that ratios relating to financial liabilities are weak, the implication is that contractors need to reduce their financial liabilities to achieve a good solvency profile. Contractors may use the benchmarks to check their financial performances relative to that of their competitors. To reduce financial risks, project clients may use these benchmarks to examine contractors’ financial performance.

This study provides benchmarks for contractors and clients to examine the financial performance of contractors in Singapore. A decision tree is provided to aid clients in making decisions on which contractors to appoint.

The purpose of this research is to understand US Upper Midwest dairy farm profitability performance over time and across herd size. Profitability is broken down into asset efficiency and operating profit margin. The primary objective is to determine how much information is required to accurately benchmark farm performance.

Financial ratios to measure profitability (rate of return on assets), profit margin (operating profit margin ratio), and asset efficiency (asset turnover) were collected from Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin business analysis programs for dairy farms from 2000 through 2016. Financial ratio patterns were examined both across time and herd size. Annual distributions were divided into quartiles and the use of one to five-year averages were used to determine accuracy of quartile rank compared to true long-run farm profitability performance.

Financial performance across large herds was more uniform than across smaller herds. Small and large herd profitability performance converged in poor years but diverged in good years. Using three or more years performance greatly improved accuracy of benchmarking profitability.

The data utilized are very rich in the sense of the amount of variation across years and herd size. The results have important implications for farm financial management and benchmarking farm financial performance. Farm firms should benchmark multiple years of profitability before making major management changes to alleviate deficiencies.

“Paying for performance” has been the corporate mantra for ages, but finding the right performance benchmarks continues to be an enigma. Equally significant is the ongoing debate on the superiority of economic value added (EVA) aligned executive incentive plans over traditional financial performance benchmarks to ensure optimal goal congruence between the corporate and the executive performances. Consequently, this paper aims to explore a plausible linkage between executive compensation and EVA for Indian corporates from a social constructivist perspective.

The study uses a mixed method approach where the quantitative analysis of responses from the survey of senior personnel/finance executives of Indian firms is complemented by the qualitative analysis of personal interviews to provide contextual depth to the quantitative data.

Based on the study, the researchers construct an understanding that EVA is a superior concept but has restricted utility primarily owing to its computational complexity and unaudited characteristics. The researchers’ interpretive inference finds mandatory disclosure of an audited EVA figure in the corporate financial statements as a prime requirement for EVA to emerge as an objective and visible performance measure.

Attention of policymakers is sought towards standardising its computation and ensuring its disclosure to bring it at par with the conventional executive financial performance benchmarks.

The narrative on benefits and the challenges of adopting EVA aligned performance management system is provided directly by the top-level executives responsible for designing the “paying for performance” policies.

To study the nature of management accounting performance measures in the Financial Services Industry (FSI). The nature of Performance Measurement (PM), specially non‐financial PM in FSI (service “shop”) has not been explored before.

This exploratory multiple case study consists of survey, interviews with questionnaire, individuals' (senior management and executives) interviews, collecting primary and secondary sources of information as well as literature surveys.

The results of this study demonstrate that the actual practices of the recent trends of management accounting in non‐financial PM are negligible in the studied financial institutions, and management of studied banks paying more attention to improve and measure financial performance than that to non‐financial performance for different reasons that affect the function/operation of FSI.

The field study is being conducted without a conceptual/theoretical framework. An explanatory case study with particular theoretical framework/model could make possible to discuss the factors that affect non‐financial PM in this particular industry. Moreover, a comparative study with manufacturing industry would make the research results more robust.

A stable economic condition and competition that would increase the need and importance of non‐financial PM in FSI as well as in other services (and even in manufacturing industries).

This paper explores the nature of management accounting PM particularly in FSI.

The purpose of this study is to invoke prospect theory to construct an empirical framework to predict idiosyncratic risk, and argue that when a firm performs better than its benchmarks, the firm tends to play safe by avoiding firm-specific risk to maintain its satisfactory performance level, but when a firm performs worse than its benchmarks, the firm may become aggressive with taking more risks to achieve an increased level of performance.

This study tested the relationships between restaurant firms’ future idiosyncratic risk and the proposed firm financial characteristics. Heteroscedasticity- and autocorrelation-consistent (HAC) standard errors (Newey and West, 1994) were used to deal with potential problems of autocorrelations and heteroscedasticity. The standard error of residuals from the Fama-French three-factor model (Fama and French, 1993) was estimated to proxy for restaurant idiosyncratic risk.

The main analysis reveals that five financial characteristics are significant predictors for restaurant firms’ future idiosyncratic risk in accordance with the proposed, negative relationship based on the prospect theory.

Managers may predict their competitors’ future risk-taking behaviors using the current study’s findings, which will provide competitive advantage in a highly competitive business environment that we have now. Also, in practice, restaurant investors may consider findings of this study in forecasting future risks of their portfolio to help evaluate and revise their portfolios.

First, this is a new endeavor of its kind dealing with the restaurant industry, filling the void in the literature in predicting the risk-taking behavior of restaurant firms in a time of crisis. Second, this study forms a prediction model that establishes “predictive causality” (Diebold, 2001) motivated by prospect theory. Third, building upon prior research, this study comprehensively examines relationships between the firm characteristics that capture firm-specific strategies (Ou and Penman, 1989) and the idiosyncratic risk that are “associated with firm-specific strategies” (Luo and Bhattacharya, 2009) in a restaurant setting. Finally, the findings of this study bear significant implications for practitioners and other parties of interest.

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a matched sample comparison group study of elements of organizational culture that enable knowledge processes to drive superior firm performance.

A matched sample comparison group approach was used to compare firm performance among matched pairs of public companies. Companies demonstrating high levels of trust (benchmark group) were matched with firms of similar size in the same industries demonstrating lower levels of trust (control group).

The benchmark group generated significantly superior value, operating performance, and had higher average annual growth rates than matching firms in the control group. Firms with higher relative levels of trust embedded in the organizational culture are more likely to outperform similar firms with lower levels of trust.

The findings are based on surveys and financial performance of companies with securities traded on stock exchanges in the USA and may not represent other organizational forms, other geographic, economic, or cultural environments.

This study begins to identify a link between knowledge management, organizational learning, and knowledge creation (collectively knowledge processes) with firm performance.

Identifying elements of organizational culture that link knowledge processes with firm performance is essential to developing a leadership model that reinforces enabling cultural attributes.

Many researchers have identified a lack of empirical research linking knowledge processes with firm performance. This study begins to fill the research gap with evidence that elements of organizational culture, specifically trust, enable firms to convert knowledge and learning initiatives into tangible performance recognized by financial markets.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how a pre‐requisite programme and key performance indicators can be developed within an information management system in order to manage food safety, animal welfare and business performance criteria effectively in the poultry meat supply chain and seek to deliver continuous improvement.

Desk research was carried out in order to develop the research model. Competitive benchmarking with a group of broiler growers was used to determine the most appropriate performance indicators that could differentiate both operational and financial performance.

Supply chain benchmarking is more than a comparative analysis of cost structure, indeed it can be argued that if not effectively implemented, benchmarking techniques can focus too much on historic data rather than identifying and implementing current best practice, knowledge transfer and being able to initiate change within the business cycle. Effective livestock benchmarking requires a detailed understanding of the processes undertaken in order to determine the ideas and information that needs to be shared both vertically and horizontally in the chain which in turn will deliver compliance with stakeholder requirements and drive continuous improvement.

The limitations of the research have been discussed in the paper.

This research is of value to those working in the poultry meat supply chain.

In a previous paper the authors emphasized the advantages of multicriteria methodologies to evaluate business performance. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the metachoice problem that always arises in a benchmark multicriteria analysis that can be synthesized as follows: “how to choose an algorithm to choose?”

In order to perform a benchmark analysis, a set of criteria must be chosen. In the Balanced Scorecard approach, for example, key performance indicators (KPIs) are grouped in four different perspectives: financial, customer, internal processes and learning and growth. In this paper, the authors focus on multicriteria benchmark analysis applied to KPIs of the financial perspective. The paper considers a set of criteria used in financial statement analysis based on balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement. A case study is described.

The main findings of the paper are when the evaluation of a firm is based on different genuine criteria, a metachoice problem arises: multicriteria ranking algorithms cannot be selected using a multicriteria algorithm; the choice of an algorithm ultimately depends on the subjective preference of the policy maker; and the authors metachoice solution to the benchmarking problem is in accordance with Simon’s satisfacing solution, describing a non-maximizing performance measurement methodology.

The paper provides several practical implications in all cases in which a ranking has to be assigned to a group of firms based on financial performances. More in general the problem is very relevant when a ranking has to be carried out with respect to a set of projects, a set of strategies, a set of organizational units, etc.

The adoption of a set of criteria is certainly an advantage to avoid uni-criterial myopic evaluation. However, this also creates some methodological problems. The paper demonstrates the “relativity” (subjectivity) of results of the evaluation process when there are many evaluation criteria, as in a benchmark context. This is a metachoice problem that cannot be solved by using another multicriteria algorithm.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how transportation price benchmarking impacts firm performance.

In this study, firm transportation costs and other financial variables are examined with regression analysis. This study extends empirical research on benchmarking by using current data, taking a longitudinal approach, using additional research methods, and by taking a contingency theory approach to examine firm performance contingent on the relative size of benchmarking information.

Firms can reduce prices paid for transportation (thereby improving firm performance) by participating in benchmarking consortiums, and the amount of price reduction is contingent on the size of firm transportation spending relative to that of the benchmarked firms. Furthermore, the contingent relationship is concave, which indicates that participation in benchmarking consortiums can be optimized.

Despite the wide range of companies in this sample and the longitudinal approach of this research, this study examined benchmarking performance in just one marketplace (truckload transportation).

The findings help managers to lower transportation costs and optimize the benefits that can be obtained from benchmarking.

Transportation prices paid by firms are difficult to obtain because firms are not required to isolate and disclose this information on financial statements. Therefore, the transparency of transportation pricing data in this study which include a wide cross-section of firms provides a unique examination of actual transportation prices and how they can be used for benchmarking.

The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework for benchmarking implementation in small medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) taking into consideration their characteristics.

The paper begins with the review on the definition of SME and a comparison of the characteristics of SMEs and large organizations. It presents the need for a framework and its relationship with benchmarking and TQM. This is followed by reviewing the benchmarking implementation frameworks proposed by researchers and discusses these frameworks based on their strengths and weaknesses from SMEs perspective. The frameworks were categorised into two broad types based on the different writer's background and the approach on how they view the benchmarking implementation process.

The paper suggested a conceptual framework for benchmarking implementation dedicated to the automotive manufacturing SMEs. This framework guides them through from the start to end of the benchmarking process. The framework was validated at six pilot case study companies, which gave useful comments and suggestions regarding the usefulness and applicability within the SMEs context.

The conceptual framework is still in the development stage and research is undertaken to include the pilot study companies suggestions and comments into the final version of the framework.

This guidance and framework provides a useful guide for companies to adopt and adapt before embarking on their benchmarking journey.

This paper fulfils an identified knowledge gap and offers practical help to SMEs starting out a benchmarking implementation effort.