- Has both physical and abstract resources at its disposal.
- Has some guarantee of continuity or stability.
The importance of taking a systems approach to improving fruit and
vegetable quality was emphasized by Shewfelt and Prussia (1993), who
highlighted the need to consider preharvest factors, include management
functions, and emphasize latent damage (damage caused at one point
but not detected until later). While preparing their book they realized
that postharvest systems did not exist. Rather, a more realistic model
was to view postharvest businesses as links in a chain.
The Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) was developed recently at the
University of Lancaster, England (Checkland, 1993; Checkland and
Scholes, 1990), for understanding and improving the ill-structured,
messy problem situations found in the real world. A strength of SSM is
its ability to combine technical issues with social and managerial issues
found in what are called human activity systems. As mentioned, the term
“soft” is used because each person viewing a real system may have a
different understanding of its purpose, goal, and related problems. SSM
is commonly described as a seven-stage approach to working on unde-
fined problem situations to bring about improvements. The stages are as
follows:
- Identifies a situation considered problematic.
- Expresses the elements of structure and process and the climate sur-
rounding them. - In this stage the effort moves from the real world to systems think-
ing about the real world by writing “root definitions” (RD) that de-
scribe several viewpoints of the problem situation. - Develops a conceptual model (CM) for each RD in the form of a di-
agram showing activities and interactions among them. - Compares the CM diagrams from stage 4 with the real world situa-
tion described in stage 2. - The differences found in stage 5 stimulate debate, which leads to the
definition of feasible and desirable changes to the CM in stage 4. - Actions are identified and taken to improve the problem situation pre-
sented in stage 1.
The cycle can be repeated after the situation originally described in
stage 1 has changed due to the process. The root definitions are evalu-
ated for completeness by using the mnemonic, CATWOE, where C is
Customer, A is Actors, T is Transformation, W is Weltanschauung or
Worldview, O is Owner, and E is Environment.
Literature 269