AN EXPERT DIAGNOSIS SYSTEM FOR THE BENCHMARKING OF SMEs’ PERFORMANCE

Although benchmarking has proven to be valuable for large businesses and organizations for quite sometime, up until recently, serious doubts existed as to its usefulness for smaller businesses. In this paper, we present the PDG, a benchmarking system meant to evaluate SMEs from an external perspective in order to produce a diagnosis of their performance and potential, complemented with relevant recommendations. Our research results show that benchmarking allows SMEs to improve their operational performance thus confirming the usefulness of benchmarking. These results also confirm the value of the recommendations included in the PDG report concerning short-term actions to be undertaken to modify management practices. We think the PDG system proves that if the benchmarking approach is tailored to SMEs’ characteristics, an adequate tool can be devised and used to help SMEs increase their performance.