Project 1

A small engineering consulting firm is establishing a plan for next year. The director and the three partnersneedtoprioritizetheeightprojects.Theexpectedprofit foreachproject isgiven inthefollowingtabletogetherwiththenumber ofperson-daysrequired toprepareeachproject. Another measure included is the computing resource measured as the computer processing unit (CPU) time (in hours). You have been tasked to evaluate which projects they ought to pursue based on efficiency. Given the sample data below, you plan to construct a data envelopment analysis (DEA)model:

1. Which measures would you regard as inputs and outputs, respectively? Please provide yourjustification.
2. Conduct data envelopment analysis, explain what type of DEA model is selected and describe the project you regard as "efficient" and "inefficient",respectively.
3. Which project would you recommend andwhy?
4. In what ways can you improve on your recommendation? You are free to openly source for other datasets (or create one) and justify the new set of input and output measures before conducting another data envelopment analysis. Elaborate on your recommendations andsolutions.
5. Assuming that you have to consider the project from a different industry in your analysis and you can have any data and measurement at your disposal, what would be the ideal steps taken to ensure that the projects from different industries are comparable?

Project	Profit (in million )	Person- days	CPU time (hours)
1	2.1	550	200
2	0.5	400	150
3	3	300	400
4	2	350	450
5	1	450	300
6	1.5	500	150
7	0.6	350	200
8	1.8	200	600