Applying Meta-frontier Approach to Evaluate the Operating Efficiency of Depots: A Case of a Home-delivery Service Provider in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Tsai, Wan-Rung, 蔡宛容
• Other Authors: Chao, Shi-Liang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/z6mnsf

碩士 === 國立臺灣海洋大學 === 航運管理學系 === 104 === In Taiwan, home-delivery service (HDS) was initiated in 2000. The emergence of E-commerce changes the shopping habits of customers and booms the cargo throughput of home delivery industry. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficiency of main operation depots of the largest HDS provider in Taiwan in 2012. Based on different level of delivery technique, all decision making units (DMUs) were classified into three groups: Urban, Country and Mixed. In terms of profit efficiency, five inputs (maintenance and repair of vehicles, fuel consumption, labor, operation area and other expense) and two outputs (collected and delivered parcels and collection fees) are taken into account. By linking new profit efficiency model of Sahoo et al. (2014) with Nerlovian profit indicator of Chamber et al. (1998), this study proposes a new model called new Nerlovian profit inefficiency (NNPI) indicator to decompose the profit inefficiency into technical and allocative inefficiency. Then meta-frontier model is also applied to measure the efficiencies, accordingly, profit gaps, technical gaps and allocative gaps can be measured. According to the empirical analysis of this study, most country depots are approaching the profit level of the frontier of this group However, there is a gap between the frontier of country depots and meta-frontier, implying that the profitability of country group is far beyond the meta-frontier. On the other hand, most urban depots are the most inefficient based on group-frontier and meta-frontier but there are no gaps between both frontiers. That is, urban group is the leading group whose frontier is overlapping with meta-frontier. It’s suggested to enhance the technical capability and reallocate the resource of each depot in urban group to improve the inefficiencies. Besides, no matter which frontier is adopted to measure the efficiency, the results indicate that profit inefficiency is mainly resulted from allocative inefficiency. Depots should review its allocation of resources and adjust their operating strategies to enhance the overall performance.