Application of DEA in benchmarking: A systematic literature review from 2003–2020

Abstract

Benchmarking is an effective method for organizations to increase their productivity, quality of products, reliability of processes or services. The organization may make a comparison between its performance and that of the peers from benchmarking, and recognize their advantages as well as disadvantages. The main objective of the present systematic literature review has been the study of DEA benchmarking process. Therefore, it examined and gave a summary of various DEA models applied worldwide to improve benchmarking. Accordingly, a list of published academic papers that appeared in high-ranking journals between 2003 and February 2020 was collected for a systematic review of the DEA benchmarking application. Consequently, the papers selected have been classified according to year of publication, purpose of research, outcomes and results. This study has identified eight major applications including: transportation, service sector, product planning, maintenance, hotel industry, education, distribution and environmental factors. They take up a total of 82% of all application-embedded papers. Among all the applications, the highest recent development has been in both the transportation and service sectors. Results showed higher potential of DEA as a suitable evaluation method for the further benchmarking researches, wherein the production feature between outputs and inputs has been practically lacked or very hard to obtain.