ارزیابی تاثیرات اصلاحات نهادی بر تغییرات بهره وری بندری: مالکیت، ساختار سازمانی و تغییرات بهره وری عامل کل بندرهای کانتینری جهان

This paper evaluates how port institutional reforms influenced efficiency gains between 1991 and 2004. We constructed a panel data for port ownership, corporate structure, and port inputs and outputs for 98 major world ports, and we implemented the Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) model. The MPI provides efficiency measures for input combinations that allow for obtaining the outputs in the presence of institutional reforms, ownership changes, main agent problems, technological progress, efficient scale growth, and many other reasons for efficiency and the lack of it. The results illustrate that ownership restructuring contributed to total factor productivity gains. The restructuring induced optimized operation of container terminals, especially for large ports, as it allowed specialized private entities to concentrate on terminal operation and cargo handling services.

In popular management theory, goal-setting and efficiency measurement play a pivotal role, expressed in phrases such as “what gets measured, gets done” [22]. From the viewpoint of management practice, questions related to what level of efficiency an organization needs to achieve and how it should set appropriate efficiency target are some of the main issues for managing organizational efficiency [12] and [21]. In this paper, the issue for measuring efficiencies of existing stores and decision-making problem for setting business revenue target of a new store are addressed. These problems are drawn from a home improvement company in Taiwan. The company has established 22 chain stores to sell do-it-yourself products including more than thirty thousand items and to provide professional design and consultation for home improvement. In order to enhance the service competence to cope with intense competition within the same business sector and to meet the diverse demands of customers, the top management attaches great importance to efficiency analysis. Thus, to obtain an objective efficiency measurement in last period the regional managers must evaluate not only the business revenue earned by the stores in their respective regions, but also the performance of resource utilization in earning that revenue. Furthermore, important considerations have arisen due to the development of a new store establishment proposal. In addition to allotting the input resources for a new store, a regional manager must determine what efficiency level the new store should achieve and how much business revenue it should earn. Under the target of business revenue, the store manager and the subsidiary workers will devote themselves to develop effective marketing and service plans for delivering the target. Since the company plans to establish new stores each year in different regions, such considerations have become important issues for corporate administration, and so this is thus a problem worthy of investigation. Each store consumes some resources in implementing the tasks to obtain some concerned results. Conceptually, the relative efficiency of a store is calculated as the ratio of weighted sum of outputs to weighted sum of inputs. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been shown to be a powerful tool for measuring the relative efficiencies of the homogenous decision-making units (DMUs). In this study, the chain stores are referred to as homogenous DMUs. DEA and the relevant techniques are employed to deal with the problems under consideration. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The next section presents the fundamentals of DEA models and the relevant techniques. Section 3 describes the proposed approach consisting of five stages. Section 4 illustrates the implementation of the proposed approach via a simulated application. Finally, conclusions are given in Section 5.

It is seen in the literature that goal-setting and efficiency measurement play a pivotal role in current management theory and practice. In order to manage organizational efficiency, the questions related to what level of efficiency an organization needs to achieve and how it should set appropriate efficiency target for the organization need to be resolved. The issue for measuring efficiencies of existing stores and decision-making problem for setting business revenue target of a new store are addressed in this study. The problems are drawn from a home improvement company with 22 chain stores in Taiwan. In order to enhance the service competence to cope with intense competition within the same business sector and to meet the diverse demands of customers, the top management attaches great importance to efficiency management. To obtain an objective efficiency measurement, the regional managers should not only evaluate the monetary amount of business revenue earned by the stores in their respective regions, but also quantify the performance of resource utilization in earning that revenue. Furthermore, some important considerations arise when developing a proposal to establish a new store. In addition to allotting the input resources for the new store, a regional manager must determine what efficiency level the new store should achieve and how much business revenue it should earn. As the company plans to establish new stores each year in different regions, such affairs have become important issues for administration practices, and is thus a problem worthy of investigation. A five-stage approach is developed to deal with the problems under consideration. Since the problems contain strong ordinal data, the suitable IDEA and inverse IDEA models are developed as core techniques of the proposed approach. A simulated application considering the 11 chain stores established in the region of southern Taiwan is presented to illustrate the implementation of the proposed approach. For efficiency measurement, four inputs (manpower, store floor area, operating expense and number of households in the trade area) and one output (monetary amount of business revenue) are adopted to suit the managerial requirements. Regarding the input manpower, the workers in different ranks are transformed into compound manpower that includes all workers. An IDEA-CCR model is developed to obtain the aggregate efficiency for detecting the performance of resource utilization of existing stores, while the BCC model is employed to obtain the value of v0 for detecting the status of returns-to-scale. The input and output amounts of existing stores are then adjusted according to the status of returns-to-scale. In the process of establishing a new store, the regional manager must set a challenging but attainable efficiency level for the new store and allot the amounts of input resources for it. Then, the target of business revenue should be properly set for the new store. This target is viewed as the minimal amount of business revenue which the new store should deliver in next period so that its aggregate efficiency score can at least maintain the expected level. Under the efficiency-driven thinking of the regional manager, an inverse IDEA-CCR model is proposed to set the target of business revenue for the new store. The regional manager agrees that the proposed approach is an effective technique to solve the problems encountered. It will be implemented as a decision support tool in the near future.