Benchmarking the competitiveness of industrial sectors

Purpose - The paper aims to present a clear methodological path for assessing the competitiveness of a specific industrial sector with the use of the Industrial Excellence Award (IEA) model. The paper introduces the concepts evaluated by the IEA model and addresses the ways with which varied management data may be analyzed in order to provide useful insights for improvement in industrial processes such as new product and process development, supply chain management, strategy formulation and deployment. Design/methodology/approach - Sixty European textile companies provided information concerning their business processes over the course of three years in accordance with the Industrial Excellence Award (IEA) model developed by INSEAD Business Schools. Subsequently, the textile industry companies were compared with 73 excellence‐driven European manufacturers which either won or distinguished themselves in the award competition during the same time period. The management information from both datasets was treated with the proper statistical tools (according to their nature) in order to attain secure and minimally biased conclusions. Findings - The benchmarking process revealed the areas in which the textile sector was lagging behind the excellence‐driven manufacturers. Furthermore, it detected their differences in specific measures of industrial management and business mentality. On a theoretical level, the analysis verified the general reliability of the IEA model's scales, aiming at assessing abstract management constructs while fine tuning them. Research limitations/implications - The thorough inspection of the textile companies' performance attributes and characteristics has identified many of the sector's shortcomings that merit further investigation. Practical implications - The results of the analysis served as valuable feedback to textile managers aiming at bettering their industrial processes in many ways, such as benchmarking their performance against their sector or other sectors, and observing trends that managers from other sectors are putting effort into in order to improve their performance. Originality/value - The paper provides a clear‐cut methodology for the understanding and statistical analysis of multifaceted industrial management data included in excellence models.