Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2011 (2011), Article ID 946549, 11 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2011/946549
Research Article

A Data Envelopment-Based Clustering Approach for Public Sugar Factories in Privatizing Process

Department of Industrial Engineering, Eskisehir Osmangazi University, 26480 Eskisehir, Turkey

Received 31 March 2011; Revised 17 June 2011; Accepted 19 June 2011

Academic Editor: Ezzat G. Bakhoum

Copyright © 2011 Ezgi A. Demirtas. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Turkish Sugar Inc., a public enterprise including 25 factories, is the first corporation of Turkish industry. According to the government policy, public sugar factories (PSFs) will be privatized as geography-based 6 portfolio groups in two years. As performance measures of PSF affect government, sugar producers, and several unions in privatizing process, a systematic approach is necessary to measure efficiencies and grouping factories. This paper uses a new DEA- (Data Envelopment Analysis-) based clustering approach for measuring efficiency scores of PSF and grouping them instead of geography- based portfolio groups. This new approach can help decision makers in privatizing process. At the same time, target values obtained by dual model can be used to eliminate inefficiencies of some PSFs.