The manufacturing sector is a major driver of growth for the economy of several countries. Technological progress and the increased wealth of consumers have stimulated manufacturing companies to sell a large variety of products in the market. Market competition has become more and more globalised, complex, and uncertain, therefore, the manufacturing environment has been drastically affected by such changes.
The need for lowering operations costs, improving production efficiency and productivity, increasing flexibility and meeting environmental requirements has made managers’ decision-making very hard, forcing firms to deal with a huge number of metrics to constantly evaluate the performance of both their manufacturing system and their competitors.
Non-parametric methods based on the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach are now widely used and accepted as benchmarking and performance evaluation techniques. This is different from conventional statistical methods which focus on central tendencies, DEA is interested in identifying units that are either on the frontier of best performers or units which are far from them providing information that conventional methods are unable to discover. Furthermore, as DEA allows for the analysis of a multiplicity of inputs and outputs of the manufacturing system at the same time, it provides a comprehensive investigation of its performance.
We aim to address research on applications of data envelopment analysis in the broad area of manufacturing. This special issue welcomes both methodological contributions and empirical quantitative research based on surveys, case studies, etc. Interdisciplinary research is also encouraged.
Suitable topics include but are not limited to:
- Measuring eco-efficiency in production
- Supplier selection and ranking
- Selection of manufacturing technologies
- Measuring performance of the supply and logistic chain
- Performance analysis of manufacturing companies and sectors
- Performance evaluation of production processes
- Methodological advances of DEA
Important Dates
Manuscripts due by: 1 September, 2017
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