Efficient Service Location Design
in Government Services: A Decision Support System Framework
Narasimhan, R., Talluri S.,
Sarkis, J., and Ross, A
Journal of Operations Management,
Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 163-178, 2005.
This paper
presents a decision support system for efficient service location design for an
agency in the State of Michigan. We consider a total of 169 branch offices of
the agency located in 79 counties that process a variety of transactions and
provide services including automobile registrations, issuance of driver
licenses, recreational vehicle registration, and personal identification
registry. The proposed methodology and decision support system incorporate a
number of factors such as branch office efficiencies based on multiple measures,
budget restrictions, capacity limitations for processing transactions, and
demand requirements in designing an efficient service system. Our approach
employs data envelopment analysis (DEA) and mixed-integer programming (MIP)
models. A series of experiments are conducted with the proposed model by
varying the levels of system-wide efficiency, resource reallocation, and budget
in generating a set of decisions that executive management of the agency can
implement. In addition, we investigate service channel management issues that
the agency is currently facing in providing the services by web, phone,
facsimile, and mail in addition to branch offices. We discuss how the branch
closures influence channel management decisions.
click on star to go back to Joseph Sarkis' Homepage