Productivity benchmarking of apparel industry using hierarchical evidential reasoning

Abstract

In the last two decades, productivity assessment of apparel organizations has attracted significant attention. The apparel industry of Bangladesh has been making crucial contribution to rebuilding the country and its economy. Apparel sector is now the single biggest export earner for Bangladesh. Productivity is a key determinant for the success of any organization. Traditional productivity measures are based on measuring the quantities of outputs produced as well as the inputs used in the production process. However, these quantitative methods cannot usually be applied to measure the organization’s productivity, if it’s any output or input has a qualitative type of nature. Therefore, there is a need for a new measurement method that this type of organizations could use in managing their productivity. Subjective productivity measurement is a measurement approach that collects information about qualitative inputs or outputs of productivity through a questionnaire or an interview targeted to an interest group. The productivity assessment process of apparel organizations is aligned with several sources that can be uncertain, including incomplete information, limited domain knowledge from decision-makers, and failures to provide accurate judgments from experts. In this study, the Hierarchical Evidential Reasoning (HER) approach is developed to manage this expanding complexities and uncertainties in assessment problems. The HER approach is employed here to develop a multiple criteria framework to assess the apparel productivity. A case study of our apparel organizations is provided to illustrate the implementation process. Results shows that using the HER approach the apparel productivity performance index are determined and according to this performance index the organizations are ranked. After analyzing the productivity of these apparel organizations, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to find out the most influential attribute of each industry. Thus, it has been found that it is possible to use HER for benchmarking of our apparel enterprises. This model can also be used for the performance assessment purpose and benchmarking of different fields.