Identifying the operational best practices through association Benchmarking – DEA: the case of oil refineries

This work studies the implementation of an Operational Research method named Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in a stage of a benchmarking process, in order to identify and evaluate the operational best practices of a representative model of productive units system and, through this analysis, to suggest an action plan to reach the maximum efficiency. The Benchmarking–DEA association behaviour is observed in a case study applied in a set of refineries of a multinational petroleum company.