Proposta de um sistema de indicadores de desempenho para a prática de benchmarking para a construção civil cearense

Abstract

The process of globalization and the highly competitive environment have created an urgent need to develop competitive survival strategies, requiring companies to understand better how the factors that determine competitiveness and the indices that measure it are interrelated. Considering the importance of the production function to improve the quality and productivity, it has become essential to have indicators that allow the evaluation of its performance and can serve as parameters of comparison. The general objective of the present work is to propose a system of benchmarking indicators for construction companies. For that, initially, a theoretical study about the themes pertinent to the research was carried out, where papers were raised on topics such as "performances measurement", "indicator systems" and "benchmarking". Data collection began in the literature research of indicators widely used in the practice of benchmarking in the national and international scope, identifying 166 measurements. Next, a case study was carried out in construction companies, identifying 194 indicators. A semantic analysis of the data was performed (theory and practice),aiming to eliminate duplicate data and then were organized and presented to the GERCON (Research and Advisory Group on Management in Construction) to verify the similarity found amongst the measures. After this analysis, a system with 41 indicators distributed in 11 dimensions was proposed and presented to specialists that work in the area of performance measurement, in order to verify the potentiality of the system and propositions of improvements through the considerations taken during the meetings. With the contribution of experts, the final system proposed presents 29 indicators distributed in 10 dimensions. The system proposed initially does not fully resemble the systems practiced by companies, with only 51% of the indicators being practiced by companies. This shows that there is no consensus amongst the measures practiced by the construction companies, since the indicators proposed in the initial system come from the similarity between the measures, evidencing the imminence of difficulties when implementing this system for the practice of benchmarking. The difference noticed between the initial and final systems is evident both quantitatively, since there was a significant reduction of measures, and in relation to the measures considered, since the final system has 62% of the measures that companies apply. This will facilitate the implementation of benchmarking in the construction industry. According to the experts' considerations, companies are concerned about leaving financial data available, making it impossible to share information about revenue data. However, they claim that the companies are interested in sharing the measurement of their results with their direct competitors, thus seeking to position themselves in the market and identifying the best practices to achieve better results. It was also noted that the companies have a great concern on issues such as quality and customer satisfaction, ensuring greater attention to measurements that provide information on these sectors.