An application of data envelopment analysis on marble factories

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the efficiencies of marble factories in Afyonkarahisar city via data envelopment analysis (DEA), which is a mathematical programming-based analysis. Methods: In this study, the efficiencies of 64 marble factories in Afyonkarahisar city, the most famous city in terms of marble production in Turkey, were examined. DEA was used to determine efficient and non-efficient factories. DEA is a method for analyzing a set of organizational units in order to identify the efficient units so that they can become benchmarks or peers for the inefficient units in the set and can facilitate the spread of best practice in a cooperative system. Results: In this study, the findings related to codes and current efficiencies of factories in the model of production, the operation functioning with different efficiencies and the benchmarks of non-efficient operations according to the production model were obtained. As an example of the results of the efficiency analyses, for factory code F7 employing 19 laborers to work more efficiently, it must decrease the number of laborers to 18. In addition, the sales rate in the internal market should be decreased from 50% to 46%, while the external sales rates are to be increased by 4%. Conclusions: With this study we aimed to examine the efficiencies of marble factories in Afyonkarahisar city. We also give some recommendations to the administrators of the factories for upgrading their production levels by summarizing the deficiencies of the factories, related with the results of the study. We hope that following these recommendations, the efficiencies of the factories will increase, and with increased and efficient productions, the importance of Afyonkarahisar city will be the highest in Turkey.