1 Introduction
The actual socio-economic dynamics, the aggressive
competition on a global scale, more educated and
demanding customers and a rapid pace of change in process
technology, lead companies to frequent revision of their
organizational structure, strategic objectives and decisionmaking
processes [1, 15]. This essentially means that
companies have to show great ability in adapting to changes
imposed by their own target market [16, 17].
Organizations need, therefore, some methods that can
provide for an innovative approach to their investigations to
business problems in order to [2]:
• identify the main cause-effect relations which
characterize the environment in which they operate;
• find new approaches allowing for better control on
production systems and more effective use of the
enterprise resources.
In this regard, System Dynamics (SD) provides a useful
interpretation of business contexts, analyzing how policies
and decisions affects the structure of companies and the
dynamics of the available resources [13].
Even if the publishing storm around JIT may have subsided
to a certain degree in recent years [11] and many analytical
methods have been published for its analysis [10, 3], the
kanban system is still a subject of active research and its
potential for significant improvements of operations is
documented by several studies [12, 5].
Particularly, in this paper a SD model for a