An Optimal Best Practice Selection Approach

This paper develops a new optimization approach for evaluating and selecting a set of best practices for implementation at strategic business units (SBUs) of an organization. Based on the balanced scorecard and multiattribute decision making, an evaluation model is developed to generate a relative contribution value for each best practice to indicate the degree to which it influences the achievement of the local objectives of the corresponding SBU and the global goals of the organization. An optimal selection model is developed to select a minimum set of best practices for meeting the specified goal achievement levels of the whole organization and of the individual SBUs. An empirical study on a company with four SBUs implementing 9 cross-unit and 17 unit-specific best practices is conducted.