Measuring the Overall Efficiency of the Sugar Supply Chain in Iran

The sugar industry has many backward and forward linkages in the supply chain. In this industry, a chain of agricultural, industrial, oil, transportation, and commerce sectors is engaged to transform raw materials into product and shipping it to consumers. In this research, the efficiency of decision-making units in Iran's sugar supply chain is evaluated using network and simple Data Envelopment Analysis methods. Results of the first level of decentralized sugar supply chain in Iran (extraction of sugar from sugar beets) indicate that the average technical efficiency in terms of a constant return to scale and the allocation, economic, and scale efficiency are not at appropriate levels. In the second level of supply chain, weakness was observed in allocative and economic efficiency. The results showed that the Provinces of West Azerbaijan and Khorasan-e Razavi offer desirable conditions for sugar beet production in terms of efficiency. Supply chain management has been used as a tool for timely delivery of the product to market at a lower cost to increase the efficiency of the entire sugar supply chain. A move toward vertical integration in sugar production is also proposed to benefit integration.

Keywords:

Allocative and economic efficiency , Network data envelopment analysis , Sugar beets , Technical efficiency.