Аpplication of the benchmarking approach in managing the economic activity of regional mining clusters

Abstract

The intensification of competition in the international market presents new requirements for managing industrial clusters. There is a need to preserve only those cluster members who are able to withstand leading competitors in the market. Otherwise, the economic activity of all interconnected enterprises of the cluster is threatened with insolvency. Hence, the use of benchmarking in the management of the economic activity of industrial clusters is of great relevance. As the methods of the approach make it possible to identify advanced standards of product quality and competitiveness in a cluster based on a comparative analysis of the behavior of the most powerful competitors in the market. It is well known, that the traditional goal of creating an industrial cluster is to make economic ties in the industry due to territorial proximity and functional dependence of the members included in the cluster of organizations and enterprises. Herewith, the competitive advantage in the cluster is achieved due to the costs decrease in the result of the interaction. However, the approach does not require the adaptation of the cluster enterprises to the advanced competitive standards and the development of coordinated actions aimed at the problem solution. It causes another challenge – the incapability of the cluster members to confront leading competitors in the market, which negatively impacts the results of the economic activities of all cluster enterprises. To solve the problem, it is necessary to form a new organizational and economic mechanism for managing coordinated economic activities of cluster members on the basis of the benchmarking approach considering the regional specifics of the economic conditions of the production. The main idea and purpose of the article is to justify the content of the mechanism and its functions, allowing to form a reference competitive standard for the cluster using benchmarking analysis and to manage the process of adaptation of enterprises to this standard based on the modeling of their coordinated investment activities, the benefit of which is possible only under the condition of synergistic results of cluster cooperation. Modeling of the mechanism involves the use of the following methods and approaches: the interindustry balance method to reflect the economic relationships of cluster members, investment modeling, the additive method of convolution of criteria, linear scaling and benchmarking approach to assess the competitiveness of the cluster, as well as the original method suggested by the author to assess the multipliers of the total added value. The scientific novelty of the proposed organizational and economic mechanism concerns the development of a benchmarking method for justifying competitive standards for the cluster enterprises along the production chain, as well as the construction of a mathematical model that predicts the impact of their joint investments on their compliance with these standards and the scale of economic activity. The innovations suggested by the author have been used to identify the intersectoral complex of enterprises forming the competitive mining industrial cluster of Perm krai. Moreover, the impact of a joint investment project on the repair of mining equipment on the compliance of cluster enterprises with the reference competitive standard has been assessed by the author. The developed organizational and management mechanism develops the basis for a new area of economic analysis, which measures synergistic results, that are only possible within the framework of cluster systemic economic interaction.

Keywords

cluster, benchmarking, regional economy, mining industry, competitiveness, cluster management, investments, multiplier, synergistic effect, economic and mathematical modeling, forecasting

For citation

Zhulanov Е.Е. Аpplication of the benchmarking approach in managing the economic activity of regional mining clusters. Perm University Herald. Economy, 2019, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 462–481. DOI 10.17072/1994-9960-2019-3-462-481

Acknowledgements

The article has been financially supported by the Russian Foundation for the Basic Research as a part of scientific project No. 19-010-00449 “Development of regional development strategy using “smart” benchmarking: Methodology, programming, and practice”.

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