Many companies, especially in high tech industries, are facing shrinking product lifecycles and increasingly complex production and product technologies. Selling many products in semiconductors, disk-drives or products in telecommunications has shrunk has shrunk to a time span less than a year. These market dynamics pressure production facilities to begin full scale production at a point when the underlying process technology is still ill understood. Consequently companies suffer from substantial yield losses, which can dramatically affect the economics of the product, production facility, and business. The production ramp-up will be defined as the time span equal to the difference between time to market and time to volume. A major goal of innovators is to reduce the time to market, but they cannot evaluate the effects on the time to volume. This paper will give insights in these interdependencies and compare two policies for the management of changes during production ramp-up.
For many organisation going on line in an eBusiness venture is often fraught with difficulties in discerning the strategy and value in such a venture and the possible outcomes. Organisations are revisiting their services and/or products and developing eBusiness systems that are capable of exploiting the organisations business supply chains. Central to any development of this nature is the managers understanding of the implications of an Internet eBusiness venture to the organisation and industry they wish to compete in. This paper outlines an insight into a framework for mapping business process models onto service and product based business models.
Regularly generating innovative products is a key success factor in established industries. Major companies frequently outpace each other with innovations and product offensives. But what are the effects of such initiatives? And how can companies organize their innovation pipelines in order to successfully manage such ventures? The process in which innovations are developed and integrated into marketable products is highly complex and can be organized in various ways. An important distinction introduced by this paper is to separate between product development processes and processes for innovation generation. In established industries the first ones regularly initiate product development projects and strive to meet certain launch periods. The latter are problem-solution oriented and driven by the search for new, innovative concepts. They are characterized by risk and a high degree of uncertainty regarding success und completion time.This paper introduces a work-in-progress-model of such innovation pipelines oriented at the typical structures in the automotive industry.
Residual values are considered of major importance for an automotive product/brand in various aspects. They are believed to have a major influence on attributes such as: new car sales, pricing options, buyback risk, and image perception. The presented paper refers to a work in progress model developed for the analysis of residual values in the automotive industry. It is designed to analyze how an automotive company can support and take advantage of residual values. Among others, the following questions are addressed:
-What are leverages/policies that effect residual values?
-Which leverages/policies are particularly effective/sensitive?
-What effects/consequences regarding the new car business are to expect by changes in residual values?
Although the model is designed and developed for practical use in the automotive industry and can not be revealed in detail, it provides important aspects that are worthy of discussion with experts in the field of System Dynamics. It represents a new approach to the subject of residual values and connects to previous work such as Sterman (2002). The developed model realistically reproduces the course of residual values in relation to specified market cycles and given exogenous factors. It has proven valuable for questions regarding effective leverages and policies to residual values.
A system dynamics model of individual performance is developed and simulated. Performance, a behavioral factor, depends upon and influences emotional and cognitive factors: stress, mood, and motivation. Activation, found in both stress and motivation literatures, is treated separately. Each causal relationship is assumed to be simple and unambiguous. Analysis of the model output under a range of work conditions shows that ambiguous or complex relationships would be supported by traditional research. Complex relationships between stress, motivation, and individual performance emerge from model structure and interactions, rather than from assumed causality. This work demonstrates the benefit of simulation in theorizing when multiple factors operate in tandem.
We model the dynamics associated with evolution of the core and the periphery of a social-network. The model is based on an existing behavioral theory of the inter-firm (Baum and Ingram 2002). The formalization allows us to refine this existing theory through the introduction of a target setting process. Allied analysis documents the efficacy of exploration and exploitation policies within the core and across the periphery of a social network. Our results show that the competitive advantage accrued through exploration and exploitation is crucially affected by the behavioral biases, imitation and the target setting associated with the evolution of key constructs.
This paper, through two separate teaching fragments in the delivery of chemistry education, is to demonstrate the use of system dynamics and the subsequent research process by using software STELLA, which clearly reflects the system thinking.
As to the decomposing reaction of H2O2, students encountered some unexpected reaction phenomenon. With the help of the STELLA, they conducted in-depth research on the causes that lead to such phenomenon mentioned above. The final modeling process clarifies the reaction for the students. Whats more important, it also helps them form the initial concept of system thinking.
When studying molar volume of gas, the teacher took as the starting point the four famous Chinese ancient inventions and then moved further to the study of rocket propeller. From the viewpoint of a student at secondary school, they gradually uncover the underpinning theories of rocket propeller. This process brought to them a great sense of achievement and joy.
Such a process is beyond any imagination in our traditional teaching conduct. It is not only a harmonious combination of system thinking and the studying of chemistry theories, but in addition, it brings the fundamental reforms in the chemistry education at secondary schools.
What aspects of basic system dynamics are covered by the traditional school math curriculum? The Booth Sweeney and Sterman (2000) bathtub tasks and the Jensen and Brehmer (2003) rabbits-and-foxes task were dissected into aspects. Questionnaires with tasks tapping into the identified aspects were administered to first-semester university students with a math-intensive high school background. Performance were as expected and conformed to the results of previous studies with these tasks. These results encourage further effort to devise additional tasks covering more basic aspects identified, and refining the existing tasks. Equipped with a well-design battery of tasks, it would in all likelihood be informative to test it with different participant groups, such as undergraduate, as well as graduate, students in math, engineering, and system dynamics.
Housing for the poor remains a major policy problem in U.S. cities. Jay Forresters 1969 Urban Model predicted that increasing the availability of low income housing exacerbates the city deterioration. Poverty and homelessness are on the rise in this country. Families, often single parents with children, and the elderly are two of the largest groups affected. Subsidized housing is one way to fight homelessness. This years budget proposal has President Bush slashing funding to the department of Housing and Urban Development, including many programs that help supply housing to the poor. I plan to investigate various low income housing policies to determine how and why they would or would not work.
As New Year rolls in, many of us take on challenge of personal change. Many set goals to lose weight; do more exercises; watch less television; do more studying; do less partying; or to shed a habit such as smoking. For several years in our Quality Management course students were asked to work on a term-long personal continuous improvement projects. The students were briefly introduced to basic concepts of causal loop diagrams and were encouraged to use them to clarify their theories regarding their own progress or lack of it. The basic premise is that the result students obtain and the dynamics they experience are built into the structure of their worldview and they learn if they can communicate and influence their worldview. This paper uses systems thinking lens to discuss the improvement framework and the experience reported by students. Majority of students did not make the progress toward their goals as much as they would have preferred. The student generated diagrams to explain their theories were either too simple or overly complicated, awkward and partially flawed. However, it can be claimed that the process of using the tool to clarify their thinking itself was worthwhile. After reviewing their narratives and the diagrams, several archetypes were consistently noted.