A system dynamics model for a single-stage multi-product kanban production system

The actual socio-economic dynamics and the aggressive competition on a global scale lead companies to frequent revision of their organizational structure, strategic objectives and decision-making processes. Organizations need, therefore, some methods that can provide for an innovative approach to their investigations to business problems. Even if the publishing storm around JIT may have subsided to a certain degree in recent years and many analytical methods have been published for its analysis, most of the academic papers concerning pull production suggest Discrete Event Simulation (DES) for systems management. Only little attention has been paid to System Dynamics (SD) applications. In this paper a SD model for a Single-Stage Multi-Product Kanban system will be proposed and tested under different demand patterns.