EFFICIENCY MEASUREMENT IN CAYKUR FACTORIES WITH FUZZY DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS

Even though Turkey is the world's fifth largest tea-producer country, its share in the world tea export volume is as low as negligible. In addition, unit tea-production costs in Turkey are much higher than those of other tea-producing countries. In order for CAYKUR, the most important player of Turkish tea industry, to gain competitive advantage against the competitors in the private sector and other countries' manufacturers depends on using its resources efficiently. Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis (FDEA) models are very fruitful tools for measuring efficiency levels of decision-making units in fuzzy environment. In this study, efficiency measurement was performed in 20 tea factories of CAYKUR for the year 2013. In the application, the FDEA model developed by Lertworasirikul et al. was conducted and the efficiency scores were computed for five alpha-cut levels. Then, an integrated single efficiency score were calculated for each tea plant via Chen and Klein's fuzzy ranking approach so as to rank the plants with regards to the performance. It is hoped that this study presents useful information to the decison-makers of the tea industry. Furthermore, this paper is one of the first attempt to measure efficiency with FDEA models in the world tea industry.