Efficiency Frontier Identification on the Context of Operations Strategy – A Study on Representative Constructs and Variables

Abstract The efficiency frontier is a function that indicates the maximum level of attainable performance result by a given set of inputs. The frontier is estimated based on the observation population of companies’ inputs and outputs, considering a representative sample. On the operations strategy context, inputs can be understood as the competitive priorities, with should be managed to lead through a superior organizational performance. Some methods for calculating technical efficiency are proposed in literature and all of them requires inputting and output variables. This paper presents a process for defining variables based on statically analysis of the round 4 of High-Performance Manufacturing (HPM) data. The HPM project seeks to identify the practices adopted by high performance organizations and applies a survey with companies in 18 countries. The survey includes 1597 questions in 12 categories, culminating in a huge set of variables. Multivariate Data Analysis techniques are performed to establish a representative set of variables. As a result, we present the constructs to evaluate each input and output performance. This is an important contribution for the development of a Decision Support Systems for Manufacturing based on the frontier estimation techniques, which could be seen as a representative innovation to operations management and production research.