Performance appraisal and improvement guidelines for technical– vocational training centers based on balanced scorecard approach (BSC) and data envelopment analysis (DEA): Case study–Yazd centers

Performance appraisal plays an important role in determining faults and difficulties of any organization. Technical and Vocational Training is incurring heavy expenses in every country. This study presents the development of a conceptual framework which aims to assess Technical and Vocational Training centers from multiple perspectives. The level of efficiency in Technical and Vocational Training centers is a good criterion to understand how they consume their resources. In this research, relative efficiency of 13 Technical and Vocational Training centers of Yazd in the Persian calendar year 2010-2011 is calculated using data envelopment analysis technique (DEA) and balanced scorecard (BSC). BSC has been used as a tool to design performance appraisal indexes in four perspectives (financial, Customers, internal processes, learning and growth). DEA, as a non parametric method, is one of the most important and significant management tools for measurment of outputs or efficiency and ranking. On this basis, Sadoogh center had 100% efficiency in all four perspectives of BSC, and Taft center with .592 efficiency had the lowest one. Total performance score of centers is 0.869 in the financial perspective, 0.848 in customer, 0.763 in internal processes, and 0.733 in learning and growth. By integrating the BSC and the DEA approach this research helps to identify where there is room to improve organizational performance and points out opportunities for reciprocal learning between centers (DMUs). This article provides a set of recommendations relating to successful application of DEA and its integration with BSC, in order to promote a continuous learning process to present solutions for improvement of performance quality levels of inefficient units in those four perspectives and also to determine the most productivity scale size (MPSS) in any perspective for inefficient centers.