Benchmarking Automotive After-sales Service Companies with Dependent Criteria-Application of Data Envelopment Analysis.

Benchmarking is a tool for evaluating organizational performance with a learning approach from oth)ers. The importance of benchmarking in every industry is clear for anyone. In the automotive industry, the performance of after-sales service agencies in Iran is evaluated every year by Iran Standard and Quality Inspection company. One of the ways to continuously improve in after-sales service agencies is benchmarking of successful and efficient examples in the network. In this paper, a benchmarking model is developed considering that the repair index and customer satisfaction are interdependent. To improve the accuracy and operationality of benchmarking, some constraints have been added to the model with the opinion of experts. Considering the dependent parameters, a data envelopment analysis model has been proposed and this model has been implemented to benchmark 20 after-sales service agencies of a car company. By solving the model and comparing it with the results of the original model, it was observed that the considered conditions changed the benchmarking and in)creased the accuracy. This paper discusses the concept of the impact and importance of dependent parameters in benchmarking, and with this concept, a benchmarking model for automotive after-sales service agencies is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]