Assessing the on-road route efficiency for an air-express courier

Abstract

This paper proposes an EXO-CAT data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to evaluate the efficiency of on-road activities (pickup and delivery) for an air-express courier on a route-by-route basis. The proposed model combines the constraints of exogenously fixed inputs DEA and categorical DEA to account for the continuous and discrete external environmental factors affecting the courier route efficiency. We select labor, route length (a proxy of fuel consumption), and vehicle capacity as the inputs; number of documents delivered, number of boxes delivered, number of documents picked-up, and number of boxes picked-up as the outputs. A case study with 248 on-road routes currently operated by an air-express courier in Taiwan is undertaken. It is found that stop density, travel speed, and service area type have significant influences on the couriers' route efficiency. Based on the detailed DEA results, the managers do not need to perform check-rides for all routes; instead, they need only to focus on the most inefficient ones. Such DEA results can also be applied to develop new projects or make judgments on investing any new on-road routes. Copyright C 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.