Efficiency-driven Manpower Disposition

This paper employs the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to simultaneously deal with the efficiency measurement and manpower disposition problems of a home improvement company in Taiwan. Four inputs (manpower, store floor area, operating expense and number of household in the trade area) and one output (monetary amount of revenue) are adopted to well suit to the managerial requirements. The workers in different ranks are transformed into the compound manpower such that all categories of workers are included in the input. A three-stage procedure is proposed to carry out the manpower disposition for the new store. The implementation of the proposed approach is illustrated by a simulated application of the stores in southern Taiwan.