Quantitative modelling of benchmarking process

In this paper, we consider the problem of establishing a quantitative model allowing, given a set of production units (enterprises, plants, banks, university departments, etc.), to determine those units that can be considered as benchmarks in terms of production efficiency and to evaluate for a unit, that is not a benchmark the gap that separates it from the benchmarks. A production unit is considered here as a transformation centre that consumes resources (input items) of different nature (information, human resources, energy, money, etc.) to deliver some products (output items) of different nature as well (manufactured products, services, information, energy, etc.). This benchmarking problem is, therefore, a multicriteria ranking problem that necessitates sensitivity analysis process to determine which items a given unit must improve in order to become as efficient as benchmark unit(s). We propose in this paper to formulate this problem using satisficing games, an evaluation method, that is, based on two measures namely selectability measure (that measures production level) and rejectability measure (that is, related to resources consumption) for each unit or alternative. Units for which the selectability measure exceeds the rejectability one will be considered as satisficing units and the benchmark units are those satisficing units that are not dominated.