Organizational eficiency of consulting engineering firms: proposal of a performance indicator

Abstract

At the present global economy, the main concern of the entrepreneurs is to survive in a growingly competitive market that works worldwide, does not have borders anymore, and does not inhibit competition. Companies, which are not able to adapt to this environment, are at risk of collapse. In this paper, we propose a model that allows the calculation of a performance indicator for the organizational efficiency as a measure of competitiveness, applied to consulting engineering firms. This indicator aims to offer a comparative framework of the organizational efficiency of a company, having as references, on the one hand, the environment where the activities of the company are developed and, on the other, a virtual competitor achieved by the optimization of the resources of the initial sample of data of our study. The model estimates that the best adjusted production function for this kind of companies comprises the number of employees, not only technical but also administrative, as explicative variables. Furthermore, taking into consideration the initial data, the companies that display better ratios of organizational efficiency have 90% of technical personnel, approximately, regarding the total number of employees of the company, and an annual turnover around 100.000 Euros per technician.

At the present global economy, the main concern of the entrepreneurs is to survive in a growingly competitive market that works worldwide, does not have borders anymore, and does not inhibit competition. Companies, which are not able to adapt to this environment, are at risk of collapse. In this paper, we propose a model that allows the calculation of a performance indicator for the organizational efficiency as a measure of competitiveness, applied to consulting engineering firms. This indicator aims to offer a comparative framework of the organizational efficiency of a company, having as references, on the one hand, the environment where the activities of the company are developed and, on the other, a virtual competitor achieved by the optimization of the resources of the initial sample of data of our study. The model estimates that the best adjusted production function for this kind of companies comprises the number of employees, not only technical but also administrative, as explicative variables. Furthermore, taking into consideration the initial data, the companies that display better ratios of organizational efficiency have 90% of technical personnel, approximately, regarding the total number of employees of the company, and an annual turnover around 100.000 Euros per technician.