A cooperative approach for benchmarking process

The work presented in this article deals with industrial performance improvement through implementation of a cooperative benchmarking process. The majority of benchmarking applications actually practiced in the market are made by the initiation of direct competitors or through the companies recognised as industry leaders. In this type of benchmarking, usually, the firms do not intend to share their knowledge. The proposed study is rather interested in building a mutually cooperative approach among partners. Without aspiring from exhaustiveness and by relying on some of the results of game theory, the main objective of our study is to describe some of the conditions susceptible to favor the emergence and maintainability of this cooperation. Collaborators have to share and exchange their skills and knowledge, which require an infrastructure to facilitate their relationships. Thus, the second objective of our study is therefore to propose a network structure and to describe its characteristics for efficiently implementing cooperative benchmarking process.