Abstract:
In competitive markets, the operations strategies of companies are normally formulated based on their competitive advantages. An effective operations strategy should maintain and improve competitive advantages based on the capabilities of the corporate operations resources. Considering the market requirements and the operational performance of the rivals is the key for success and survival of a company in the competition. Therefore, recognizing where a company stands in comparison with its rivals and adopting the appropriate operations strategy plays vital roles in the success of companies. This paper proposes a method for comparing and ranking operations strategies of companies based on the concept of efficient frontier using data envelopment analysis (DEA) in grey environment. In the aforementioned method, DEA is used to evaluate the efficiency of operations strategies of manufacturing firms. Also, grey theory is used to support the uncertainty of the experts’ opinions regarding the inputs and outputs of the DEA model. Then the respective units are ranked, and analyses are performed. The proposed approach is applied for the entire nine cement factories of Fars Province in Iran, and the units are ranked, respective analyses are presented regarding the efficient and inefficient units.
Machine summary:
"com Analyzing the operations strategies of manufacturing firms using a hybrid Grey DEA approach – A case of Fars Cement Companies in Iran Mohamad Amin Kaviani a, Mehdi Abbasi *a a Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, Shiraz branch, Islamic Azad University, Shiraz, Iran Abstract In competitive markets, the operations strategies of companies are normally formulated based on their competitive advantages.
This paper proposes a method for comparing and ranking operations strategies of companies based on the concept of efficient frontier using data envelopment analysis (DEA) in grey environment.
Keywords: Operations strategy; Competitive advantages; Performance objectives; Efficient frontier; Prioritizing; Grey DEA.
Selecting four competitive advantages as inputs to the DEA model and two indices as model outputs, Bulak and Turkyilmaz (2014) evaluated the efficiency of 744 production units from 10 sections of industry.
2. Step 2- Data collection for Inputs and Outputs At this stage, to extract input data for DEA, linguistic variables were used as survey criteria by conducting interviews with the members of the board of directors and the production managers of each of the 9 cement factories of Fars Province and asking for their opinions about the 5 performance objectives pertaining to the factories’ operations strategy.
5. Conclusion and future research Not only this proposed Grey DEA method evaluated the efficiency of Fars Province cement factories, but also it analyzed the operations strategy of the factories by selecting competitive advantages as input variables in the DEA model."