Internal best practice benchmarking in global corporations

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this master thesis is to help a global food packaging corporation, based in southern Sweden, to uncover, define and utilize best practices connected to selling spare parts. The defined best practices will later be implemented in the corporation’s market companies globally. The methodology of the project has been to benchmark organizations with similar type responsibilities and work. The research design has mainly been divided into a quantitative analysis (analyzing sales data) and a qualitative analysis (interviews). The challenge has been to benchmark organizations that operate in different economical and political climates (macro economy) while their industries (micro economy) differ a lot as well. Therefore a benchmarking model has been developed to take these external factors into consideration. Thereby a relevant and trustworthy benchmarking output was achieved. Two best practices were found to impact the performance of an organization (sales) positively and significantly. These best practices have been communicated to the company with a suggested implementation plan. While uncovering the best practices, it has been found that organizations that perceive their competition to be intense tend to formulate a strategy. The existence of a strategy drastically improves the organization’s performance (sales). If the strategy is supported with relevant and related activities, the performance increases even further.