Capturing the Process Efficiency and Congestion of Supply Chains

This paper examines the performance of supply chain in stages keeping the essence of processes that knits the stages of supply chain. By focusing on the process as the unit of analysis, the management of Enter-organizational relations in a way which is generally known as network, on performance is analyzed. In order to enhance and extend the variation of date envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology, this paper serves to supplement the DEA literature in its application to supply chain retail sector. In addition an examination of input congestion is carried out indicates that a managerial inefficiency exist in the different process cycles of supply chains. However, presence of congestion indicates the inability to dispose of unwanted inputs costlessly. Using the DEA variation of the supply chains are partitioned into three levels/stratums namely 'best-in-class', 'average' and 'laggard'. Substantial performance inefficiency is uncovered in the four process cycle dimensions. Relatively down-stream process cycles of the supply chain exhibit better performance than the up-stream process cycles. Our innovative approach identifies areas for improved supply chain performance over the four process cycles. The classification of supply chains serve as a guideline for best practices, and projects directly to the best class.