Journal of Decision Engineering

In today highly competitive and changing business environment, systematic analysis of performance of the organization for determining the rate of success, detecting the deviations and their causes and exploring new ideas or finding the modification solutions, has been the principal concern of managers and organizations. The evaluation of the financial efficiency and using the financial indicators are one of the most common approaches in this way. Given the importance and urgency of this issue, in this study financial efficiency of the pharmaceutical companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange that are working in the field of production of pharmaceutical products has been assessed and evaluated. Therefore, and in order to overcome limitations of financial ratios in this study to assess the financial efficiency of statistical sample of firms through using financial ratios, has been used the integrated approach of Data Envelopment Analysis and Balanced Scorecard (DEA-BSC).

Based on this approach and to overcome the challenges in selecting optimum combination of financial ratios, the Balanced Scorecard approach has been applied. For this purpose, the four key perspectives (financial, stakeholders, processes and growth) are considered as the basis for an explanation of the proposed financial ratios. In order to choose the right financial ratios, a panel of industry experts (experts in the field of financial and pharmaceutical fields) formed and through monitoring their specialized comments, in each perspective three ratios were selected as an indicator of financial performance measurement and then were weighted. This process will cause the appropriate influence of each indicator according to its importance in the statistical sample companies. In addition, the suitable type of data envelopment analysis approach that is consistent with the nature of the study have been selected and used. Finally, by doing the mathematical calculations and solving the relevant equations through using the operations research software (GAMS), the financial performance of each company of the statistical sample of the research was estimated and according to this basis the companies were ranked