Reliable estimation of suppliers’ total cost of ownership: An imprecise data envelopment analysis model with common weights

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a management accounting technique that evaluates the total cost of a business partnership using a time-consuming activity-based costing procedure. Studies have suggested that TCO-based data envelopment analysis (DEA) can effectively estimate the results of TCO with substantially less effort and time; however, its adoption in practice is limited due to certain shortcomings. First, managers struggle to understand and accept the uncommon weighting schemes of existing TCO-based DEA models because traditional TCO analyses require a common set of weights. Second, both the traditional TCO approach and TCO-based DEA models are designed to handle precise data, whereas TCO analyses often involve imprecise data from conflicting data sources and estimations.