Benchmarking with quality-adjusted DEA (Q-DEA) to seek lower-cost high-quality service: Evidence from a U.S.bank application

Benchmarking is a widely cited method to identify and adopt best-practices as a means to improve performance. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been demonstrated to be a powerful benchmarking methodology for situations where multiple inputs and outputs need to be assessed to identify best-practices and improve productivity in organizations. Most DEA benchmarking studies have excluded quality, even in service-sector applications such as health care where quality is a key element of performance. This limits the practical value of DEA in organizations where maintaining and improving service quality is critical to achieving performance objectives. In this paper, alternative methods incorporating quality in DEA benchmarking are demonstrated and evaluated. It is shown that simply treating the quality measures as DEA outputs does not help in discriminating the performance. Thus, the current study presents a new, more sensitive, quality-adjusted DEA (Q-DEA), which effectively deals with quality measures in benchmarking. We report the results of applying Q-DEA to a U.S. bank's 200-branch network that required a method for benchmarking to help manage operating costs and service quality. Q-DEA findings helped the bank achieve cost savings and improved operations while preserving service quality, a dimension critical to its mission. New insights about ways to improve branch operations based on the best-practice (high-quality low-cost) benchmarks identified with Q-DEA are also described in the paper. This demonstrates the practical need and potential benefits of Q-DEA and its efficacy in one application, and also suggests the need for further research on measuring and incorporating quality into DEA benchmarking. The review process of this paper was handled by the Edit-in-Chief Peter Hammer.     

Aquametric submicro determination of water content of biopolymer preparations and its application in deriving hydration isotherms

A rapid aquametric submicro method is proposed for determining 10-100,mug of bound water in 20-60 mug amounts of biopolymers. This method has been applied in deriving isotherms of water-vapour adsorption by biopolymer preparations (proteins, tRNA), in a dynamic mode requiring only 5 mg of the substance. The BET equation was used to determine the effective capacity (h) of a monolayer in the course of sorption (h --> ) and desorption (h <-- ), corresponding to accessible primary hydration sites on the biopolymer molecule surface. As has been established for proteins with known spatial structure, omega-amide groups of Asn and Gln residues and ion-pair forming groups do not participate in the formation of the BET-monolayer during sorption. Such an interpretation of the isotherms underlies the estimation of the number of surface and screened polar groups in the molecules of biopolymers with a spatial structure not yet established from amino-acid analysis and hydration isotherms. The maximum hydration (H(s)) of globular proteins is much less pronounced than that of tRNA, which can be explained by an irregular arrangement of sterically separated primary hydration sites which do not form a matrix for distribution and ordering of water at great distances. The deficiency of sorption sites because of sterically inaccessible groups is a trait common to biopolymers in general. Therefore, hydration isotherms may characterize certain aspects of the macromolecular structure, such as compactness, degree of screening of the polar groups, regularity of arrangement of the primary hydration sites, and so on.     

IR-active lattice modes of α-glycine and deutero-α-glycine

The 9 IR-active lattice modes of alpha-glycine have been observed in the far-infrared using a Fourier transform Michelson interferometer.     

An estimate for the small parameter in the asymptotic analysis of non-linear systems by the method of averaging

The Method of Averaging is an asymptotic method that can be used to obtain approximate solutions for many parameter dependent non-linear systems. The resulting approximate solutions are as accurate as desired provided the system parameter is sufficiently small. In this paper, a general technique is developed to obtain a relationship between the magnitude of the small parameter and the permissible error in the approximate solution. The technique is then demonstrated by its application to two examples.     

Synthesis of 4-alkoxy-Δ3-pyrrolin-2-ones and tetramic acids

Acetoacetic ester is converted into 4-alkoxy-Δ³-pyrrolin-2-ones which can be hydrolyzed to give tetramic acids.     

Observation and assignment of phonon combination bands in the far infrared dielectric response of GaAs

A determination by dispersive Fourier transform spectroscopy of the frequency dependence of the anharmonic self-energy of the q??O transverse optic phonon in GaAs at 300 and 6 K is presented. The measured self-energy function is compared with the two-phonon density of states function calculated from an 11-parameter rigid ion model, and the model is found to account satisfactorily for all features in the measured spectrum as phonon combination bands.