Pure technical efficiency and performance benchmarking of Malaysian F&B firms: A BCC-SBM analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55573/JISED.118766Keywords:
Data envelopment analysis, BCC model, slack-based measure, pure technical efficiency, benchmarking, food and beverage industry, resource efficiencyAbstract
This study evaluates the relative revenue-generating resource efficiency of 14 publicly listed Malaysian food and beverage (F&B) companies using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Audited corporate data for financial years ending in 2025 were analysed using property, plant and equipment (PPE) and employee headcount as inputs, with revenue as the output. An input-oriented Banker–Charnes–Cooper (BCC) model under variable returns to scale was first employed to estimate radial pure technical efficiency. Peer-group analysis was subsequently conducted to identify the conditional benchmark prominence of frontier firms, followed by an input-oriented slack-based measure (SBM) to diagnose input-specific excesses among firms located below the radial frontier. Five companies achieved radial BCC scores of 1.000, while nine were below the frontier. Three-A Resources showed the highest conditional benchmark prominence under the reported optimal solutions. The SBM analysis identified the largest potential PPE reduction for Spritzer and the largest employee reduction for CAB Cakaran. The findings demonstrate that radial efficiency measurement and non-radial slack analysis provide complementary information on resource utilisation, with the latter revealing substantial differences in the sources of inefficiency across firms. The results are sample-specific and should therefore be interpreted as exploratory decision-support evidence rather than prescriptive resource-reduction targets.
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