Farms Strategic Grouping for Competitive Benchmarking Using SOM

The world of agricultural farms is characterized by a great diversity in terms of quality and behavior. Consequently, the principles for management diagnosis and evaluation used today on commercial companies cannot directly be used on farms that must be grouped with farms of similar managerial patterns. In this paper, we illustrate the use of the SOM technique for managerial performance evaluation and benchmarking for pork farms. The motivation behind the SOM is to transform the data into a two-dimensional grid of nodes while preserving its topological structure. The benchmark strategic groups are discussed and comments are offered to illustrate how pork farms can use the benchmark information to redirect their strategic positions in order to survive and remain competitive in the long run. Our results are very promising and confirm the efficiency and robustness of clustering and managerial benchmarking method of pork farms using quantitative and qualitative data with a SOM algorithm.