Resumen de Perspectives for the measurement of distribution productivity
The measurement of productivity in manufacturing operations has changed opinion concerning possible improvement areas � while traditionally focus has been on direct laborbased productivity improvement, current practice has changed to favor more systems approach. In majority of situations this means that the most important focus areas are then related towards direct and indirect purchases. Then the utilization of labor and machinery resources has been seen as secondary important and even in some situations spare capacity has been identified as enabler of flexibility and better quality.
Despite of the occurred changes, the systems approach of productivity measurement has only been widely applied in manufacturing settings � operations related to distribution differ from manufacturing in some major ways, mostly because the product itself is service based. In practice this means that the inventories could not be used to hedge possible demand changes. Also because of this there does not exist any �real� direct material purchases. Because of these differences, productivity measurement should be modified to correspond for these requirements. In this paper we develop approach to measure distribution productivity in total, and also show some exemplary analysis concerning group of Finnish transportation companies. Further managerial applications are also suggested based on the analysis.
