A number of challenges face firms that need to decide when and whether to convert from technologies to new computer-based technologies. Such is the case with lithographic setup shops, which prepare photos for color printing; they must choose between continuing with traditional craft methods or acquiring digital image-processing equipment. Pioneering firms can be saddled with experimental, undependable, and expensive prototype systems. Rapid technological changes still occurring in digital systems can allow competitors who invest later to obtain cheaper, more effective equipment. But firms investing later may find themselves paying for the large investment just when most competitors are established in the new technology and competition has forced prices and profits to low levels.In order to create an organizing framework for analyzing and developing conversion strategies for these firms, we worked in collaboration with Inter/Consult, the project's sponsor, to build a system dynamics model of the color process industry, its market, and a typical firm. The primary purpose of the moel is to provide a clear understanding of the impact these major capital investments will have on the profit structure of lithographic setup shops and to help these shops develop effective conversion strategies. A secondary purpose of the model is to aid digital image-processing equipment suppliers in understanding their market and to provide them with a toll for generating alternative scenarios given different assumptions about economic trends, technological developments, prices, market size and composition. The model serves as a strategy support system that allows clients to derive scenarios explicitly from causal assumptions and to evaluate alternative investment strategies.

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Date created

• 1983

Type

• Document

Processing Activity

• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

License

• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
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ITEM CONTEXT

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b0aa2a699b54f0d19f6a9d93bdbcfa18

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Part of

cf82ceba47eedd73f41b00918de16477

Scope and Contents

Part of

23d738ba88f8333bc39725f9cb5bd0b8

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Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

Scope and Contents

Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives