Barriers to the practice of benchmarking in South African restaurants

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to find the barriers of benchmarking use in independent full-service restaurants in South Africa. The global restaurant industry entities operate in a highly competitive environment, and restaurateurs should have a visible advantage over competitors. A competitive advantage can be achieved only if the quality standards in terms of food and beverage products, service quality, relevant technology and price are comparable to the industry leaders. This study has deployed a descriptive, quantitative research design on the basis of a relatively large sample of restaurateurs. The data was collected through the SurveyMonkey website using a standardised questionnaire The questionnaire was mailed to 2699 restaurateurs, and 109 respondents returned fully completed answer sheets. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. The main findings were as follows: 43% of respondents had never done benchmarking; only 5.5% respondents considered themselves as highly knowledgeable about benchmarking; respondents thought that the most significant barriers to benchmarking were difficulties with obtaining exemplar (benchmarking partner) best-practice information and adapting the anomalous (own) practices to derive a benefit from best practices. The results of this study should be used to shape the knowledge about benchmarking practices in order to develop suitable solutions for the problems in South African restaurants.

Rapid benchmarking: the case of a multinational dairy company

“…This represents a significant reduction in time, and therefore cost in undertaking a benchmarking project. This finding is likely to be of great interest to organisations as it will reduce many of the barriers to benchmarking that have been reported by previous research (Kleynhans and Roberson, 2017;Panwar et al, 2013). Also of note is that this fast time was not BIJ 28,3 achieved by removing visits to benchmarking partners and replacing them by desktop research; for rapid benchmarking projects, one or two benchmarking visits were included, therefore retaining this most valuable technique for best practice learning.…”

“…More recent sector-based research indicates that this is still an issue. A study by Kleynhans and Roberson (2017), with 2,699 restaurants participating, identified the four main barriers to benchmarking, which are as follows: 1. It is difficult to adapt anomalous (own) practices to derive benefit from best practices.…”

A Global Analysis of Universities Performance in the World Higher Education Institution Rankings

“…Finally, these studies also include adopting and implementing best practices based on the process results (Adebanjo et al, 2010). This information access identifies best practices and partners in this process (Kleynhans & Roberson, 2017). In the same way, in the comparison processes, some barriers have been identified, such as difficulty in the adaptation processes, management of the partners in the process, trust in sharing information, internal expertise for the adaptation of the methods, difficulty in pursuit of resources (Malik et al, 2020).…”

Place-Branded Foods with Responsible and Sustainable Management: A La Carte Serving in Regional Restaurants

“…The questionnaire was constructed, administered and spread online via Surveymonkey, since this platform has characteristics that enhance the efficacy of the questionnaires themselves. As well as managing the sending out of emails and the respective answers in a practical way, it facilitates export in different formats adaptable to software for statistical analysis of the data [108].…”