Speaker: Neda Salehirad M.A.Sc.
Dept. of Wood Science, University of British Coloumbia, Canada

Local Organizers : Alireza Mohammadi and Mohammad Bahar Nemati

Title (First talk): Efficiency Analysis of Primary Wood Producers in British Columbia, 1990-2002, using Dynamic DEA
Time: Tuesday, Dec 21, 2004 at 2:00 pm

Title (Second talk): Introduction to the Centre for Operations Excellence
Time: Tuesday, Dec 21, 2004 at 3:00 pm

Location: Industrial Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran

Abstract :
Primary wood industry is one of the driving factors of the economy in British Columbia, and Canada. This industry has gone through significant changes in the last decade. This study evaluated the efficiency of primary wood producers in British Columbia in the period of 1990 to 2002. Alternative approaches were employed incorporating different DEA models. A contemporaneous and an intertemporal analysis were performed using BCC and CCR models. These models helped to capture technical, scale and aggregate efficiencies. A window analysis was also employed to better picture the efficiency trend. Finally, a Malmquist productivity index was measured using the contemporaneous efficiency scores to investigate the productivity change of the sector over time. The analyses showed that BC sawmills were highly scale efficient and their major inefficiency cause was technical performance rather than the scale of operations. Their average technical efficiency demonstrated a slightly increasing pattern within a domain of 76% to 80% from 1990 to 2002. BC sawmills could improve their productivity over the study time horizon. However, this was mostly due to employing better technologies rather than enhancing technical capabilities.