AN INTEGRATED PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT FRAMEWORK FOR RESTAURANT CHAINS: A CASE STUDY IN ISTANBUL

Companies that continue to operate in a competitive market strive the most efficient use of their resources in order to remain competitive. Nowadays, with increasing customer feedback, properly analyzing customer needs and requests and producing services in accordance with expectations have become increasingly important due to the large number of companies competing in the same market, and this is especially important to be at the forefront of competitors in the food services industry. There are risks and uncertainties owing to the continuously changing demand for food service enterprises, the difficulty to regulate interest and comparable charges, the competitive environment, and currency rate hikes. In light of all of these circumstances, restaurants require a versatile tool to effectively measure and analyze their performance. Therefore, this study combines Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Categorical Data Envelopment Analysis (CAT-DEA) to analyze the performance of 15 dealers in Istanbul, divided into three categories: steakhouse, kebab, and meatball-doner. The results demonstrate that each category has just one efficient restaurant, for a total of three efficient restaurants out of fifteen. In addition to the suggested CAT-DEA-based framework, three research hypotheses are constructed and analyzed to investigate the link between restaurant performance and various environmental factors (or relevant indicators) in the food service industry. 