Assessing the Efficiency of Mass Transit Systems in the United States

Frustrated with increased parking problems, unstable gasoline prices, and stifling traffic congestion, a growing number of metropolitan city dwellers consider utilizing the mass transit system. Reflecting this sentiment, a ridership of the mass transit system across the United States has been on the rise for the past several years. A growing demand for the mass transit system, however, necessitates the expansion of service offerings, the improvement of basic infrastructure/routes, and the additional employment of mass transit workers, including drivers and maintenance crews. Such a need requires the optimal allocation of financial and human resources to the mass transit system in times of shrinking budgets and government downsizing. Thus, the public transit authority is faced with the dilemma of “doing more with less.” That is to say, the public transit authority needs to develop a “lean” strategy which can maximize transit services with the minimum expenses. To help the public transit authority develop such a lean strategy, this report identifies the best-in-class practices in the U.S. transit service sector and proposes transit policy guidelines that can best exploit lean principles built upon best-in-class practices

Measuring the Efficiency of Pesantren Cooperatives: Evidence in Indonesia

The Cooperative (Koperasi) as a non-Bank financial institution has the purpose of improving the welfare of its members as Koperasi Hidmat and the staffs of Latifah Mubarokiyah Koperasi Ponses Suryalaya that have been since decades ago. Over time, the ideal cooperative can show a significant development and increase the welfare of its members. This study aims to determine the efficiency of cooperative as a benchmark, because by known the performance value of a cooperation, it will known the weeknesses and advantages so that it can be improved the weaknesses and maintain the advantages.The method used is apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Inputs used from principal savings, mandatory savings, and fixed assets while the output used from savings in the cooperative, savings in other cooperative and SHU. As for result of this research indicates there are 9 perfect efficient DMUs (100 %) and inefficient DMU is 11 DMUs, consisting of 7 (IRS conditions) and 4 (DRS condition). The most inefficient cooperative is Koperasi Hidmat (2014) of 30.66% efficiency level.Kopkar IAILM is able to maintain its grade efficiency level from 2009 to 2015 when compared to other DMUs cooperatives in the observation, except in 2014. The calculation of efficiency level in this research is relative and it is not absolute, so that it is possible when the cooperative sample is added or the observation year is expanded, so it will get different result. The necessity of any cooperative or BMT based on Pondok Pesantren to make annual financial statements in order to increase accountability and transparency of fund management

Analyzing the solutions of DEA through information visualization and data mining techniques: SmartDEA framework

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has proven to be a useful tool for assessing efficiency or productivity of organizations, which is of vital practical importance in managerial decision making. DEA provides a significant amount of information from which analysts and managers derive insights and guidelines to promote their existing performances. Regarding to this fact, effective and methodologic analysis and interpretation of DEA solutions are very critical. The main objective of this study is then to develop a general decision support system (DSS) framework to analyze the solutions of basic DEA models. The paper formally shows how the solutions of DEA models should be structured so that these solutions can be examined and interpreted by analysts through information visualization and data mining techniques effectively. An innovative and convenient DEA solver, SmartDEA, is designed and developed in accordance with the proposed analysis framework. The developed software provides a DEA solution which is consistent with the framework and is ready-to-analyze with data mining tools, through a table-based structure. The developed framework is tested and applied in a real world project for benchmarking the vendors of a leading Turkish automotive company. The results show the effectiveness and the efficacy of the proposed framework

Benchmarking the business performance of departmental space in universities

Purpose and Theory: In UK higher education institutions, facilities management performance tends to be measured in space utilisation and space cost. A new approach uses the �return on investment� (ROI) concept of income generation to highlight space performance at faculty/department/building level. Design and approach: Using space data from several English universities and data envelopment analysis (DEA), six types of academic units (departments, institutes or similar) are compared in regard of their respective research and teaching income. This technique allows mapping out the total �envelope� with the best performers at the edge, showing what improvement/change would be needed for the others in the group to match their performance. Findings: This is a viable method of benchmarking and gives participating institutions better and more strategic and business-oriented feedback on the performance of their space envelope than mere cost comparisons. It can potentially inform strategic decisions about university estates. However, there are barriers to applying this approach: problems posed by issues of classification and diverse organisational structures can be overcome, but lack of collaboration of facilities/estates and finance directorates; lack of centralised, accurate and detailed data pose more serious challenges

Hospital Efficiency: An Empirical Analysis of District and Grant-in-Aid Hospitals in Gujarat

This study focuses on analysing the hospital efficiency of district level government hospitals and grant-in-aid hospitals in Gujarat. The study makes an attempt to provide an overview of the general status of the health care services provided by hospitals in the state of Gujarat in terms of their technical and allocative efficiency. One of the two thrusts behind addressing the issue of efficiency was to take stock of the state of healthcare services (in terms of efficiency) provided by grant-in-aid hospitals and district hospitals in Gujarat. The motivation behind addressing the efficiency issue is to provide empirical analysis of governments policy to provide grants to not-for-profit making institutions which in turn provide hospital care in the state. The study addresses the issue whether grant-in-aid hospitals are relatively more efficient than public hospitals. This comparison between grant-in-aid hospitals and district hospitals in terms of their efficiency has been of interest to many researchers in countries other than India, and no consensus has been reached so far as to which category is more efficient. The relative efficiency of government and not-for-profit sector has been reviewed in this paper. It is expected that the findings of the study would be useful to evaluate this policy and help policy makers to develop benchmarks in providing the grants to such institutions.

Operational Research in Education

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

Financial benchmarking of transportation companies in the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) through data envelopment analysis (DEA) and visualization

In this paper, we present a benchmarking study of industrial transportation companies traded in the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). There are two distinguishing aspects of our study: First, instead of using operational data for the input and the output items of the developed Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model, we use financial data of the companies that are readily available on the Internet. Secondly, we visualize the efficiency scores of the companies in relation to the subsectors and the number of employees. These visualizations enable us to discover interesting insights about the companies within each subsector, and about subsectors in comparison to each other. The visualization approach that we employ can be used in any DEA study that contains subgroups within a group. Thus, our paper also contains a methodological contribution

Data Envelopment Analysis (D.E.A.) for urban road system performance assessment

Improving the efficiency of transport networks by enhancing road system performance, lays the foundations for the positive change process within a city, achieving good accessibility to the area and optimizing vehicle flows, both in terms of cost, management and attenuation of environmental impacts. The performance of an urban road system can be defined according to different thematic areas such as traffic flow, accessibility, maintenance and safety, for which the scientific literature proposes different measurement indicators. However variations in performance are influenced by interventions which differ from one another, such as infrastructure, management, regulation or legislation, etc.. Therefore sometimes it is not easy to understand which areas to act on and what type of action to pursue to improve road network performance. Of particular interest are the tools based on the use of synthetic macro-indicators that are representative of the individual thematic areas and are able to describe the behavior of the entire network as a function of its characteristic elements. These instruments are of major significance when they assess performance not so much in absolute terms but in relative terms, i.e. in relation to other urban areas comparable to the one being examined. Therefore the objective of the proposed paper is to compare performances of different urban networks, using a non-parametric linear programming technique such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), Farrel (1957), in order to provide technical support to the policy maker in the choice of actions to be implemented to make urban road systems efficient. This work is the conclusive study of road system performance analysis using DEA. The study forms part of a research project supported by grant. PRIN-2009 prot. 2009EP3S42_003, in which the University di Cagliari is a partner with a research team comprising the authors of this paper, and which addresses performance assessment of road networks, Fancello, Uccheddu and Fadda (2013a),(2013b)