Service quality evaluation of technical institutions using data envelopment analysis

Abstract

In the present emerging global economy, the focus has been shifted from manufacturing to service sector necessitating the quality assessment in service sector as an important issue. Education sector, especially Technical Education System (TES), is characterised as highly process oriented, intangibility and multistakeholder situations. Therefore, difficulty arises in evaluating quality of education being imparted aggregating the inputs and outputs of the system. This paper proposes an alternative method viz. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) which can aggregate the input and output components in such situations for obtaining an overall performance measure. Selected technical institutions in India are assessed for their service quality using DEA and suggestion is put forward for the non-performing institutions. The result shows significant difference between the conventional system of evaluation and DEA methods.