Retail industry has witnessed enormous growth in the past decade in developing countries like India, China, and Brazil, owing to the upswing in globalization, growing trends in e-commerce, ...multi-format retailing, and increasing penetration of the internet. The growth of opportunities, on the other hand, have intensified the competition. It is important for retailers to gain a competitive edge in the market through innovative strategies and continuous improvement. Meticulous planning and efficiency in operations are the drivers for economic sustainability and profitability of the business. Important prerequisites to gain efficiency and planning for improvement is the evaluation of base level performance, defining benchmarks and evaluating effectiveness of the efforts taken in this direction. The studies in this domain existing in the literature have analysed efficiency of retail stores as a black box transforming input to outputs. This approach lacks transparency and overlooks the subprocesses, their characteristics and internal interaction and can be addressed considering the transformation process in a two stage system. Our study addresses the issue and proposes a Bi-level Programming DEA approach to evaluate the relative efficiency of multiple retail stores considering a network structure operating in a Stackelberg relation and defining benchmarks for inefficient stores. The approach enables computation of efficiency of each sub-stage as well as the overall efficiency of the stores. The proposed approach is validated through a case study of Indian electronic retail chain.
Incorporating sustainable decisions with the retailer’s operational management has attracted enormous significance due to government regulations and customer demand for environmental consciousness. ...However, incorporating sustainable operations may interfere with the operational performance of the firm and, hence, retail companies need to examine the influence of these operations on overall supply chain efficiency. The present study develops a performance measurement model based on a two-stage network data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique for measuring the joint impact of sustainable operations and operational activities on the business performance of a retail company. A case study of an Indian electronic retail chain is presented to reveal the potentiality and suitability of the proposed models. The novelty of the paper lies in establishing DEA models for an Indian retail chain company and for providing an analytical understanding of the conditions under which the strategic decisions at the operational level successfully support the integration of sustainable operations into the SC management. The results show that the additional sustainable constraints lead to improved operational efficiency of some firms of the retail chain and result in improved business efficiency, while for other firms the integration of sustainable objectives decrease business efficiency. The significance of the study lies in providing efficient target conditions for inefficient retail stores to improve their performance. The findings of the study provide meaningful insights to Indian retailers venturing into sustainable retailing operations for enhancing the operational and business efficiency of the supply chain.
Sustainability is an important agenda for retail businesses in the present times. To create long-term value for customers, retail businesses are required to adopt approaches that can enable them to ...integrate operational efficiency with concerns for environmental and social sustainability. Optimal deployment of resources among the several stores run by a retail chain, with an objective of maximizing sustainable efficiency, is an enabling step in this direction. This research finds three main contributions to the body of knowledge: (1) resource reallocation models are proposed based on data envelopment analysis (DEA), integrating sustainability in the efficiency measurement model and aiming for improvement in the aggregated efficiency, (2) the proposed models integrate selective centralized and decentralized reallocation decisions according to the input-output characteristics, and (3) different scenarios are explored depending on whether the total resources are to be kept the same or reduced through reallocations according to the management's objectives. The application of the proposed models is illustrated with the case study of a supermarket retail chain.
PDF
