Nowadays, various methodologies are utilized to analyze and measure performance in retail industries. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) offers analysts and retailers a unique, thorough, and more meaningful way of measuring performance. The DEA based index uses the ratio between the products generated and resources used. Unlike other statistical techniques that utilize measures of central tendency for evaluation and comparison of productive stores among themselves, DEA methodology compares these stores to the best ones in the industry. This allows for the opportunity for benchmarking and makes DEA a more meaningful and helpful tool for decision support. The opinions and judgements of an expert in the analysis, concerning mainly effectiveness, have become more and more an undoubted necessity in gaining credibility. The simplicity and effectiveness of the DEA methodology helps to achieve this and turns it into a unique alternative for completing analysis. This paper presents the application of the all techniques mentioned above to obtain a single evaluation index based on the DEA method for a real case in the retail industry incorporating the expert opinions on effectiveness through artificial production units.
DEA; Artificial DMU; Efficiency; Effectiveness
