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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a practical instrument for self-evaluation of maturity in the processes of procurement and supply management, applicable to small and medium-size companies, as well as to show how the use of this evaluation tool may help companies to decide what to improve in these processes.Design/methodology/approach Based on an empirical and theoretical framework, the instrument developed measures the maturity of procurement and supply management activities in four macro-processes: materials management, purchase process, supplier evaluation process and process of procurement planning. For testing the self-evaluation instrument, the authors evaluated the maturity of 48 hospitals and 37 metal-mechanic manufacturing companies located in the southern region of Brazil. To show how to use this tool to decide what to improve in procurement and supply processes, the authors conducted a comparative analysis of a hospital and a metal-mechanic company, in relation to the sample of the same segment.Findings The results show that the instrument is reliable for practical application. Metal-mechanic industries have a greater maturity in the purchase process than in the other three macro-processes. The management of materials is the most mature macro-process in hospitals. Comparing hospitals to metal-mechanic companies, the present research shows that, between 20 and 99 employees, hospitals tend to have a higher level of maturity in the purchase process than metal-mechanic companies. With 100 employees or more, metal-mechanic companies are more mature than hospitals in procurement planning and in selection/evaluation of suppliers.Originality/value Presenting a useful self-evaluation instrument, this work demonstrates that the measurement of the maturity level, and benchmarking it with other companies, may help a firm to decide what to improve in its processes of procurement and materials management, showing how an economic sector can understand itself better. Few scientific studies have practical application to the assessment of the degree of maturity of procurement and supply management processes. Besides that the authors did not find other papers presenting a comparison of different segments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose- To analyze the limitations of two methods used in the identification of satisfaction attributes in products and services- importance performance analysis (IPA) and Kano method- and to propose a new method for identification of improvement opportunities based on the competitive analysis of the improvement gap. Design/methodology/approach- A case analyzing attributes of the service "rodizio de pizzas" a kind of pizzeria found in Brazil, was used to illustrate the proposed method. Resulting from a focus group, four attributes, one of them being an innovation, were specifically chosen to include the different categories of the Kano model: basic, performance and excitement attributes. A survey was conducted with a random sample of 110 undergraduate students that eat regularly at pizzerias. Findings- As a major limitation, IPA leads to different conclusions depending on how an attribute's importance is figured. Also, it does not take into consideration the non-linear relationship between the performance of the attributes and customer satisfaction, possibly misleading improvement decisions and hindering the introduction of innovations. The Kano method identifies the non-linear relationship between performance and satisfaction, but it does not take into consideration the current level of attributes' performance in the analysis. The proposed method successfully identified improvement opportunities in a service case, including the possible impact of including a new attribute, i.e. an innovative attribute, overcoming limitations of the IPA and of the Kano method. Originality/value- The paper provides an intuitive and simple method that correctly identified improvement decisions in the case studied, including the introduction of an incremental innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]