Abstract

Customer satisfaction offers economic benefits and competitive advantage to manufacturing enterprises. However, a gap exists in understanding how to achieve customer satisfaction due to the complexities involved in coordinating various subsystems of an enterprise in an efficient manner. In this paper, we identified four internal and external-to-the-firm customer satisfaction drivers which include: government policies, supply chain reliability, knowledge management, and manufacturing performance criteria such as on-time delivery, quality and cost. We then developed a conceptual framework to define the non-linear mathematical relationships between drivers using system dynamics modeling. We conducted "what-if "scenario analyses for a base case, optimistic case and pessimistic case using three intervention policies: "investing resources in knowledge management", "inclusion of a safety stock", and "decreasing cost of inventory" to study the impact of these policies on customer satisfaction. This work contributes to customer satisfaction research by presenting a decision-support tool that will enable the leadership of manufacturing enterprises to create a simplistic mental model of the complex interactions of an enterprise using easy-to-use mathematical relationships to capture system dynamics over time.

Department(s)

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Publication Status

Open Access

Comments

Missouri University of Science and Technology, Grant None

Keywords and Phrases

customer satisfaction; knowledge management; product development; supply chain reliability; system dynamics modeling

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

2079-8954

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2026 The Authors, All rights reserved.

Creative Commons Licensing

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Publication Date

01 Jul 2026

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