Abstract

Wen Cheng Lin * and Shmuel Yahalom

The economy of Taiwan heavily depends on sea transportation. Port planning and development are related to the trade growth and changes in industrial structure. Keelung Harbor, located in northern Taiwan and built in 1886, is the second largest commercial port in Taiwan. Keelung Harbor’s container throughput was 2108K TEUs in 1996, but it decreased to 2055K TEUs in 2008. Due to the competitive environment, Keelung Harbor must pay more attention to operational efficiency and devise an overall performance evaluation. Balanced scorecard (BSC) is a system of performance evaluation; activity-based budgeting (ABB) follows the organization’s need to budget. The two systems can help a firm reach the performance target that BSC sets. In order to evaluate the overall performance of Keelung Harbor, the authors design an evaluation system integrating balanced scorecard with activity-based budgeting to control cost and examine the achievement rate of target performance. The results of this study indicate that an organization’s target and resources can be integrated by employing the BSC and ABB systems. The results of the study can be applied to Keelung Harbor stevedoring and warehousing operations in order to improve their operations and to become a guide to other ports as well. The determination of a port’s needs could be obtained using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methods.