An organization, as an organism with complex functional and thus existential structures, regardless of the form of its activity, should be considered as a unit with varying levels of maturity against the background of external conditions. Following Müller, who believes that the higher the level of synergetic stability, the higher the productivity and efficiency of the enterprise, we arrive at the oscillation of the organization’s functioning in the space between the degree of total and zero adaptation to external conditions. This allows us to systematize the weight of the impact of individual factors on product results and thus set the directions for necessary changes within the organization, allowing for the elimination of factors hindering the organization’s development.
Value for the customer is provided by processes, which should be considered as a cycle of cause-and-effect changes, where decisions in logistics areas are inherent in creating the efficiency of the organization’s operations. Thus, a step conditioning the effective operation of the organization and building its proper strategy is a skillful diagnosis of process management, and thus the temporal localization of specific cost-quality activities, which should be consistent with the predicted model of market decisions. Precise determination and mutual coordination of actions, intentions, and specific goals favor the efficiency of the organization’s internal and external operations and the effective achievement of results, which simultaneously proves the necessity of identifying the decision space and its coupling with areas of possible experimentation in process management.
The principle of experiment
In the first phase of decision-making, it is about finding the right question, setting goals, and defining rules. This is how a problem is defined. Then one must move to the next phase, to analyze the problem: classifying it and establishing facts.
The approach to the problem of identifying the boundary parameters of a process on the condition of its necessary optimization, and thus exposing favorable development trends, enables the identification of the experiment space and the stages of its creation. A reference to the above is the position of D.M. Upton, which assumes the possible identification of the space of changes in the planes between the reallocation of process parameters and its radical redesign. Therefore, two paths of analysis appear:
1. identification of phases of synergetic organization-environment stability,
2. establishment of new process parameters within limits that do not cause system destabilization.
In parallel, on the way to identifying favorable changes is an experiment, the conduct of which is possible thanks to:
• defining the process boundary
• reallocating process parameters
• formulating main development trends and demands for changes, and consequently:
• establishing the expected values of process parameters generating specific product effects.
As a first condition, it is necessary to locate the organization in the decision-making space, which, in reference to Müller’s assumptions, allows for the systematization of the organization’s functional space (Figure 1). By relating the above assumptions to the determination of expected results and transposing them through possible temporal deviations, we can formalize the boundary values of process parameters, and thus determine the conditions for a possible experiment.
The article comes from the journal “Logistyka” 5/2008.