Benchmarking in the Academic Departments using Data Envelopment Analysis

Problem statement: The purpose of this study is to analyze efficiency and benchmarking using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in departments of University. Benchmarking is a process of defining valid measures of performance comparison among peer decision making units (DMUs), using them to determine the relative positions of the peer DMUs and, ultimately, establishing a standard of excellence. Approach: DEA can be regarded as a benchmarking tool, because the frontier identified can be regarded as an empirical standard of excellence. Once the frontier is established, then one may compare a set of DMUs to the frontier. Results: We apply benchmarking to detect mistakes of inefficient departments to become efficient and to learn better managerial practice. Conclusion: The results indicated 9 departments are inefficient between 21 departments. The average inefficiency is 0.8516. Inefficient departments don’t have excess in the number of teaching staff, but all of them have excess the number of registered student. The shortage of performed research works is the most important indicators of outputs in inefficient departments, which must be corrected.