Measuring and benchmarking productive systems performances using DEA: an Industrial Case

The study presents a comprehensive analysis of the efficiency over time of five steel plants pertaining to one of the largest private groups in Italy. In particular, the paper proposes a new technique for plant performance measurement that is able to help the management in formulating manufacturing strategies according to the performance measurements usually available in industrial environments. The analysis is carried out by the methodology of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), taking advantage of several improved solutions proposed in the literature adopted to augment the discriminating resolution. Results obtained are summed up by means of suitable cluster analysis. Finally, thanks to the dual formulation of DEA, a technical and economic analysis is proposed with reference to the productive units identified as inefficient. The technique proposed was successfully applied to the industrial case of reference and it can be easily extended to every manufacturing context.