A hybrid BSC-DEMATEL- FIS approach for performance measurement in Food Industry

Organizational performance is a complex issue given that performance is a multifaceted phenomenon whose components may have distinct managerial priorities and may even be mutually inconsistent. Recently, the balanced scorecard approach (BSC), as an effective multi-criteria evaluation concept received much attention in organizational performance measurement. Although the BSC conceptual framework has been widely accepted in the business community, the proper method of implementing the framework remains an issue. Hence, this study has developed a hybrid expert system composition of BSC, Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and fuzzy inference system (FIS) to evaluate the food producing companies. To this aim, this paper applied a graph theory based technique (DEMATEL) to determine critical criteria of BSC’s perspectives. The results show that “Profit”, “Customer satisfaction”, “Customer communication”, “Innovation management” and “Organizational asset management”, are of more importance in performance evaluation. In the next step, these criteria shape a fuzzy rule based inference system with linguistic variables and the membership functions are adjusted by experts. The results of proposed approach in food industry of Guilan province, Iran, show its applicability for evaluating the food companies.