Evaluating and Selecting Recycling Centers in Lead-‎Acid Battery Supply Chain using DEA: A Case Study

Reducing the manufacturing costs of the products is considered of the main factors for lead-acid battery (LAB) manufacturers ’sustainability and survival in the automotive industry. Then in order to meaningfully decrease the due costs and enhance the competitive potential of the manufacturers in this field, it’s important to choose the suitable sites for recycling centers in this industry’s supply chain. In the present study, data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been utilized for evaluating and choosing the recycling centers as befitting for the supply chain of LABs in the automotive industry. Pursuant to DEA and a set of criteria, as being critical for decision makers in this filed, various locations are evaluated. As this method prescribes, the locations are ranked using the maximum scores of efficiencies and after that, more appropriate centers are picked and the inappropriate ones get removed. A LAB supply chain related case study in the automotive industry has been employed for evaluating the influencing power and efficiency of proposed method and following that, a number of beneficial management results have been extracted.