International Marketing
BMBF-Project
BMBF- Research Cooperation „ServDEA“
Research Project on Industrial Services Productivity Benchmarking with Data Envelopment Analysis
Firms on industrial markets are faced with an intensifying competition. To ensure economic success, it is progressively more important for these firms to offer holistic solutions, which include services in particular. Furthermore, productivity is increasingly considered as key to economic success. The notion of productivity relates to the ability of a firm to transform its inputs into outputs. Measuring this productivity for services, however, requires a different approach than for physical goods. Several characteristics are responsible for the need of a specific approach to measure service productivity.
Such a characteristic is, for instance, the integration of customers into the production process, which can influence the productivity of services. Another peculiarity of services relates to the fact that the customer’s subjective perception of a service’s quality constitutes an important output. In order to measure service productivity and to quantify improvement potentials appropriately, an approach is required which addresses all these characteristics.
Such an approach is Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a procedure which represents the core element of our project. One of the advantages of DEA is its adjustability to the context of industrial services. Additionally, applying DEA seems promising as it compares real units – in our case: services – instead of using absolute measures. Therefore, DEA can be used as a benchmarking tool. The aim of our project is to develop DEA models such that companies can apply them to their specific service solutions. To achieve this goal and to ensure as broad a practical applicability as possible, we integrate several suppliers of industrial services into the project.
Academically, the project runs in cooperation with the Institute of Business-to-Business Marketing and the European Center for Information Systems (both University of Münster). Our industry partners are the DMG AG, the ThyssenKrupp AG and the Trumpf GmbH and Co. KG. The project is financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the funding campaign “Productivity of Services”.
Project Time Frame:
01.09.2010 – 30.04.2014
Project Partner:
Prof. Dr. Robert Wilken, Internationales Marketing, ESCP Europe Wirtschaftshochschule Berlin
