Benchmarking of marine bunker fuel suppliers: the good, the bad, the ugly

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to construct a realistic best practice benchmark and develop a methodology for comparison of individual suppliers of marine bunker fuel. As is well‐known in this trade, unfair business behaviors in the bunker fuel market are not uncommon, resulting in financial losses for the buyers.Design/methodology/approach – Establishing a best practice will naturally involve some degree of subjectivity as there is not an a priori correct answer to this problem. Using the concept of membership functions from fuzzy set theory, a score can be derived from a best practice benchmark histogram. The main advantages of this method are its relative independence both of sample size and of the underlying distribution, as well as being computationally very efficient.Findings – The authors' methodology turns out to be more powerful than standard descriptive statistics, as it is less sensitive to outliers and is well suited for small datasets and even single numbers. When applied to data for ...