Narrow Results

Sustainability factors play critical role for long-term achievement of a supply chain management and purchasing process becomes more complicated with social and environmental pressures. Managing supplier selection process is a necessary step for companies seeking to manage their corporate legitimacy and reputations. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been widely used for supplier selection problems. In this paper, we propose a new super-efficiency method for evaluating sustainability of suppliers in the presence of dual-role factors and volume discounts. We show that enhanced Russell model (ERM) fails to present a complete ranking of suppliers. Our new model presents a complete ranking and also preserves properties of the ERM. Capabilities of our proposed method are shown using a couple of examples. A case study is presented to illustrate our proposed approach. The proposed method is used to select the best sustainable suppliers.

The DEA model is applied to analyze the operational efficiency of Taiwan's publicly-listed banks to reveal the influence of the rising non-performing loan ratio (NPLR) on Taiwan's banking industry. After taking into account the NPLR and the different classifications of banks, the respective performances of different types of banks exhibit the following variations and characteristics: the originally more-efficient new private banks significantly fell behind the old public banks in terms of efficiency scores after the NPLR was included. The old private banks' operational efficiency fell behind that of the other banks at all times. The productivity of all new private banks exceeded that of the other banks.

Electronic Business (EB) on the Internet is an attractive technology for traditional business organizations to improve their financial performance. The Web-based economic model is supposedly more efficient at the transaction cost level. It also provides cost-effective marketing, global market access, and a disintermediation of costly distribution channels. The current paper uses super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to evaluate the financial performance of e-business initiatives in the retail industry. Because of the possible infeasibility of the super-efficiency DEA model, the use of super-efficiency DEA model has been restricted. This paper demonstrates that if super-efficiency is interpreted as input saving or output surplus achieved by a specific efficient DMU, infeasibility does not necessary indicate the best performance. A new approach is applied to correctly characterize and rank the performance of a set of EB companies and non-EB companies in the retail industry. This analysis indicates that the EB companies perform better in some areas than their non-EB counterpart.