Search results for "benchmarking"
showing 10 items of 112 documents
Examining Benchmark Indicator Systems for the Evaluation of Higher Education Institutions
2009
Higher Education Institutions are undergoing important changes involving the development of new roles and missions, with implications for their structure. Governments and institutions are implementing strategies to ensure the proper performance of universities and several studies have investigated evaluation of universities through the development and use of indicator systems. In this paper, we review some of the systems applied to the OECD countries, with special attention to Spain. We demonstrate the difficulty involved in establishing classification criteria for existing indicators, on which there is currently no consensus.
On benchmarking the dependability of automotive engine control applications
2004
The pervasive use of ECUs (electronic control units) in automotive systems motivates the interest of the community in methodologies for quantifying their dependability in a reproducible and cost-effective way. Although the core of modern vehicle engines is managed by the control software embedded in engine ECUs, no practical approach has been proposed so far to characterise the impact of faults on the behaviour of this software. This paper proposes a dependability benchmark for engine control applications. The essential features of such type of applications are first captured in a general model, which is then exploited in order to specify a standard procedure to assess dependability measure…
Benchmarking in Romanian industrial environment
2017
Benchmarking is a managerial tool that can assist the organizational change and the innovation. The paper aims to discover the degree in which Romanian managers in various industrial fields use this modern tool in the improvement of business strategy or organizational processes. In this context, we presented some results of a selective research made in Romanian industrial environment. The respondents were experts in creativity management and benchmarking, acting in big, medium or small enterprises. They offered many solutions for increase the rate of use of benchmarking and creativity couple in the management of Romanian organizations.
Analysis of the Motor Vehicles Manufacturing Sector in Cataluña: Implementation with Radar Charts
2013
The representation of the average periods of maturation in the axes of a radial chart allows us to know the financial position reached by companies at the end of an economic year or in a certain period. The angular indicators obtained from the application of the cosine and sine theorems, according to plane geometry principles verify the deduction obtained from the observation of the radial chart and establish whether the result of each management areas displayed offers liquidez to the developed trading activity, or it is the financial positions regardless trading activity the ones which verifies the displayed financial position in the radial chart. The indicated ratio explains why companies…
Assessing the efficiency of wastewater treatment plants: A double-bootstrap approach
2017
Abstract Benchmarking the performance of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is essential for promoting their long-term sustainability. Recent research has applied data envelopment analysis (DEA) models to evaluate the efficiency of WWTPs providing a synthetic index of their performance. However, the traditional DEA is a deterministic method; therefore, regression analysis cannot be used to explore the external factors influencing efficiency scores. To overcome this limitation, in this study, a double bootstrap DEA model was used for the first time to compute the efficiency scores for a sample of WWTPs. The confidence intervals for efficiency scores were estimated for each facility. Results…
Exploring the Potential and the Boundaries of the Rolling Horizon Technique for the Management of Reservoir Systems with over-Year Behaviour
2016
The paper presents a set of experiments on the Rolling Horizon Technique (RHT), applied to the management of a multi-reservoir, multipurpose water resources system with over-year behaviour. In the RHT, decisions on releases from reservoirs are taken for a number of time steps ahead (the Forecasting Horizon – FH) through an optimization model, based on the present water availability in reservoirs and on some forecasts of future inflows over the FH. Only the decision concerning the first time step (the current month) is then implemented, as new information on reservoir levels and forecasts becomes available so that the process can start again with updated information. The paper investigates h…
Technical efficiency and cost analysis in wastewater treatment processes: A DEA approach
2009
In light of the growing importance of water reuse as an alternative source of water resources in many regional areas, the objective of this paper is to analyse the efficiency of wastewater treatment plants as a basic requisite to improve the potential of the water reuse. The analytical benchmarking methodology Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to calculate efficiency measurements. An efficiency index is obtained for each plant by means of mathematical programming techniques, aiming to minimise the inputs used in the water treatment process. This indicator is used as a reference to analyse plants' activity through a series of variables including the size of the plant or its cost struct…
Indexes as Business Environment Characterizing Instruments
2017
Every year several world organizations evaluate countries according different criteria and determine their indexes, such as KOF Index of Globalization, Corruption Perception Index, Global Competitiveness Index, Global Innovation Index, and others. These indexes later are used for analysis of the aspects of entrepreneurship activities in specific countries. One particular application of indexes is related to analysis and evaluation of the business environment of the country. The entrepreneurship is affected by many factors; to research all of them is very time and effort consuming process. The proposed approach (i.e., use of indexes) is targeted and can yield results of the practical signifi…
Benchmarking energy efficiency of water treatment plants: Effects of data variability
2019
This study evaluates, for the first time, the energy efficiency of a sample of drinking water treatment plants (DWTPs) using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) tolerance method, which is based on the simulation of scenarios to integrate data variations. The integration of data uncertainty in energy efficiency estimation changes drastically results for approximately one-third of the DWTPs evaluated. The results showed that, even in the best-case scenario, most of the DWTPs evaluated are inefficient and may therefore, be able to reduce the energy used to treat raw water. From a policy perspective, the findings of this study reveal that omitting data variability in benchmarking would involve …
Assessment of computational methods for the analysis of single-cell ATAC-seq data
2019
Abstract Background Recent innovations in single-cell Assay for Transposase Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (scATAC-seq) enable profiling of the epigenetic landscape of thousands of individual cells. scATAC-seq data analysis presents unique methodological challenges. scATAC-seq experiments sample DNA, which, due to low copy numbers (diploid in humans), lead to inherent data sparsity (1–10% of peaks detected per cell) compared to transcriptomic (scRNA-seq) data (10–45% of expressed genes detected per cell). Such challenges in data generation emphasize the need for informative features to assess cell heterogeneity at the chromatin level. Results We present a benchmarking framework that …