Performance Benchmarking in Turkish Food and Beverage Industry

Abstract

As the competition in the business world shifts from organizational to supply chain level and consequently include multi dimensions such as cost, quality and speed; efficiency and benchmarking analyses of supply chains require special attention. Within this context, this paper benchmarks the performance of Turkish food and beverage companies and discusses their global competitiveness as well as the improvement opportunities. Namely, it purposes to search for strengths and weaknesses at company level as well as opportunities and threats at the industry level. The methodology involves the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach and related sensitivity analyses. Results illustrate that export increases supply chain efficiency scores of most companies, supporting some previous studies which show export as an indirect channel to increase productivity. Although Turkish food and beverage companies utilize a limited amount of their resources to generate export revenues and don't realize high export volumes, they seem to use their export strategies wisely and benefit from exports to a certain extent. Results also demonstrate that these companies can generate revenues but cannot utilize their resources and the related supply chains effectively to generate sufficient profits. Increasing the profit level might require more efficiently managed supply chains.