Affiliations: Operations – heretofore Management Systems, Director, System Dynamics Advisory, Gabelli Business School, Fordham University, NY, USA
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Nicholas C. Georgantzas, Professor, Operations – heretofore Management Systems, Director, System Dynamics Advisory, Gabelli Business School, Fordham University, 140 West 62nd Street, Suite 402, New York, NY 10023-7484, USA. Tel.: +1 917 667 4022; E-mail: georgantzas@fordham.edu.
Abstract: This article recounts the business-enterprise transformation that ensued from an action or praxis research, through the synthesis of statistical process control (SPC) and system dynamics (SD) simulation modeling. Intended to minimize the waste that a polymer-coating production process churned out, the SPC-SD union generated insight about the negative feedback structure of product thickness and its temperature through time, thereby enabling the client firm to leverage the dynamic equilibrium of its polymer-coating production process. Newly generated knowledge led to significantly improving end-product quality and, thereby, productivity, which tampering previously cumbered. Accrued from transforming the firm’s polymer-coating production process and operations governance, these benefits facilitated the self-development of its capability of relying on both SPC and SD for its production-strategy design and implementation tactics. Despite the praxis-research limitations, the article also offers future-research directions and policymaking recommendations. These can help capable professionals continually improve business enterprises and other societal human organizations, through the high technology of collegially self-organizing and self-governing societal human systems.
Keywords: Action or praxis research, continual improvement, critical systems thinking (CST), entrepreneur, hetero-governance, implementation tactics, intrapreneur, parabolic partial deferential equations, polymer coating, process, production strategy, self-governance, self-organization, simulation modeling, societal human systems, statistical process control (SPC), system dynamics (SD), technique, technocracy, technology, transformation
