ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: Several research activities and industrial projects have been undertaken in the area of performance measurement systems. The main reason for this is acknowledgement by practitioners and researchers that to improve it is first necessary to understand the present position and circumstances. The rising strategies, policies and methodologies of the last two decades, even from distant fields, such as Business Process Re-engineering, Strategic Benchmarking, Total Quality Management, Balanced Scorecard, Six Sigma, Total Productive Maintenance, have strongly highlighted the need, before acting, to assess the performance of the processes to be controlled, whichever the level they belong to, whether at supply chain or extended enterprise stage or, at the other extreme, at single production or simple machine level.
