Assessing the management efficiency of shipping company from a congestion perspective: A case study of Hapag-Lloyd

Shipping management has an essential influence on the development of shipping industry. Management efficiency is one of the important indexes to measure the quality of shipping management. This paper aims to assess the management efficiency from a new perspective of congestion index to point out the causes affecting efficiency and provide suggestions to the shipping company. Based on a two-stage data envelopment analysis, we establish a novel congestion management system to comprehensively examine the organization's congestion from three aspects, including the macro-level, the micro-level, and resource allocation. Accordingly, we apply three congestion models, namely stage congestion, slack-based congestion, and resource reallocation congestion, respectively, to measure Hapag-Lloyd's congestion index from 2017 to 2020. We find that: 1) Hapag-Lloyd's capacity is higher than its market share; 2) major events (e.g., merger and acquisition, COVID-19) have significant impacts on the congestion index of the company; 3) excessive redistributable resource input invalidate the congestion index. [Display omitted] •The management efficiency of shipping company was assessed by a two-stage data envelopment analysis.•A novel congestion management system was established to comprehensively examine the organization's congestion.•It is found that COVID-19 have significant impacts on the congestion index of the company.