Performance Measurement and Management (PMM) for SMEs: a literature review and a reference framework for PMM design

In recent years, performance measurement and management (PMM) has received much attention from researchers and practitioners. Despite the growing use of PMM systems, different problems cause companies to experience difficulty in implementing such systems, with consequent risk of partial benefits or total goal failure. The literature on PMM is nowadays quite vast, but only a ten of models addresses the problem in its entirety and relatively little research addresses to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Based on a structured literature review of PMM models, factors influencing PMM initiatives in SMEs and milestones for PMM design, the authors provide an evaluation of frameworks today available. Based on the identification of strengths and weakness of these frameworks, the authors propose a new integrated framework for PMM design, which fulfills the identified lacks and optimizes strengths. The framework proposed is a significant contribute to enhance SME application of such a systems.