Consolidating Findings from Business Process Change Case Studies Using System Dynamics: The Example of Employee Morale

In this paper, we explore system dynamics as a useful approach to consolidate findings from case studies on business process change (BPC) projects. We compile data from 65 BPC case studies to develop a system dynamics simulation model that helps us to investigate ‘employee morale’ as an important construct in BPC projects. We show that such simulation models consolidate the complex and often non-linear findings from BPC case studies in a way that makes it available to discourse among researchers, lecturers and students as well as BPC professionals. Thus, this paper contributes to knowledge management and learning by suggesting system dynamics as a valuable approach to illustrate and convey the complex relationships between important constructs in BPC. This paper also contributes to the domain of business process management by demonstrating the benefits of system dynamics as a way to review and consolidate the abundance of BPC case studies

Management of change in logistics: an exploratory study of companies in the agricultural capital goods sector

Logistical excellence has been a frequently discussed topic in the corporate and academic context, due to the importance of logistics to enhance the companies’ competitiveness. Several authors have highlighted the existence of key elements to achieving logistical excellence, such as the management of changes. Although this key element is widely discussed in the literature, little knowledge exists on the dynamics of its occurrence in logistics change process, since the existing publications approach this topic in a generic way, linking it to the organization as a whole. Given this scenario, this paper aims to contribute to the identification and characterization of successful cases in logistics change management in high performing companies from the agricultural capital goods sector. This results from the research made it possible to construct a descriptive panel which highlight the main characteristics of these cases, and can serve as reference base for companies of other sectors to improve their logistics’ processes