School of Continuous Improvement researchers estimated technical efficiency for every depot in a national equipment-hire network, finding the frontier held almost entirely by its smallest sites and the largest directed to emulate them.
Four quarters of operating data from 61 yards, and the peer sets issued to the 42 that fell short
Every quarter, each of a national equipment-hire group’s 61 depots receives a statement naming the other depots it ought to be more like. Locating the Efficiency Frontier of an Equipment-Hire Network, released today by the School of Continuous Improvement, is the first study to ask where those names come from.
Across four consecutive quarters the researchers estimated technical efficiency for every depot in the network. Nineteen sit on the frontier, fourteen of them among the smallest yards in the group; the ten depots most often held up as peers hold a median of fourteen machines, against a network median of sixty-three. In the quarter after the statements went out, the six largest depots reduced their fleets, and the hires they completed fell by 8.4 per cent.
The interesting part of a ranking is never the order. It is the set of things the ranking decided were alike enough to put in order at all.
— Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas
The work draws depot-level staffing, fleet, yard and wash-bay measures into a single comparative frame, harmonising four quarters of operating records into an efficiency picture the network can read end to end. The University regards the study as a substantial addition to its work on the instruments organisations use to compare themselves with themselves.
“A yard that is unlike anything else in a network is the case the method finds hardest, and the case an improvement program reaches for first,” said Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Continuous Improvement. “We would welcome the questions that raises.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.36mdpr.