Análise da eficiência dos investimentos em tecnologia da informação em lojas de supermercados de cooperativas do Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

Companies in the supermarket sector have faced significant changes in the last decades, mainly due to the increase in the use of Information Technology (IT), in the automation of cashiers operations (check-outs), business management or ecommerce. However, the relation among the efficiency of IT investments has been widely studied in the past years, with the purpose of understanding and measuring the improvements in organizational performance generated by such investments. This study has the following objectives: (1) to analyze the efficiency of investments made in Information Technology by supermarket stores from cooperatives in the state of Rio Grande do Sul; (2) to identify which areas within the company make use of IT resources; and (3) verify if investments in certain IT resources imply an increase on sales and profit. Sixteen supermarkets from cooperatives in the state of Rio Grande do Sul were analyzed. The method of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was utilized, following the framework proposed by Shafer and Byrd (2000), having as inputs the average of investments related to software, hardware, direct and indirect IT labor between the years 2003 and 2005, and having as outputs the average of annual growth of revenues and profit between the years 2001 and 2005. The Spearmann statistical test was also used to analyze the correlation between IT investments and the growth of revenues. Results show that despite the huge existent gap among companies and financial controls concerning IT, there is a strong correlation among the investments in software, hardware and IT labor and the increase on the annual average revenue growth, confirming the existence of significant positive impacts on the organizational performance.