Casual Modeling to Improve Customs Services in Iran: A System Dynamics Study

Service Improvement

'Service' is meant a desired result by costumers, it is an activity or benefit supplied by one side for another; it is basically intangible with no sense of possession. This result may be physical or immaterial (Kotler & Armstraong, 2009). Though excellent service is a winning strategy, many organizations waste their money and energy to improve service by incomprehensible plans as well as management bluffs instead of taking practical measures (L. Berry,A. Parasuraman, 1994).

Increasing competition, which has been started in 1950s and has been intensifying significantly, brings about the need to adopt modern approaches to make improvements. After World War II, applying many of improvement approaches has been increased; these approaches continue to be used. It was in Japan where using tools and techniques for improvement got started and spread; including, prevention, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Total Quality Management (TQM) which is invented by Juran and Deming. Japanese sub procedures are Kaizen, 5s and lean-time. These concepts have been transferred to the west causing some countermeasures to Japanese; such as Theory of Constraints (TOC), Business Process Reengineering (BRP), Business Process Improvement (BPI) and other approaches related to Kaizen. Many of these approaches have no clear solution or guidance regarding decision-making for improvement of different constituents; furthermore, little guidance exists to evaluate them. In the literature of the present study, there are a lot of processes and methods to evaluate them; however, most of them are static, while, flexible and dynamic processes require flexible approaches (Grünberg, 2004).